2019/05/17 by Wenhui Hou, Ahmad Azizimanesh, Arfan Sewaket +5 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #physics.app-ph #cond-mat.mtrl-sci
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41565-019-0466-2
arxiv created 2019/05/17 · arxiv updated 2019/06/11
The primary mechanism of operation of almost all transistors today relies on electric-field effect in a semiconducting channel to tune its conductivity from the conducting 'on'-state to a non-conducting 'off'-state. As transistors continue to scale down to increase computational performance, physical limitations from nanoscale field-effect operation begin to cause undesirable current leakage that is detrimental to the continued advancement of computing. Using a fundamentally different mechanism of operation, we show that through nanoscale strain engineering with thin films and ferroelectrics (FEs) the transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) MoTe2 can be reversibly switched with electric-field induced strain between the 1T'-MoTe2 (semimetallic) phase to a semiconducting MoTe2 phase in a field effect transistor geometry. This alternative mechanism for transistor switching sidesteps all the static and dynamic power consumption problems in conventional field-effect transistors (FETs). Using strain, we achieve large non-volatile changes in channel conductivity (Gon/Goff~107 vs. Gon/Goff~0.04 in the control device) at room temperature. Ferroelectric devices offer the potential to reach sub-ns nonvolatile strain switching at the attojoule/bit level, having immediate applications in ultra-fast low-power non-volatile logic and memory while also transforming the landscape of computational architectures since conventional power, speed, and volatility considerations for microelectronics may no longer exist.