There have been significant advances in the last 2 to 3 years and a shift from papers reporting fundamental properties of these materials towards proof of concept devices and high quality, large scale synthesis.
In technology speak, one could say the field has graduated into a Technology Readiness Level of 3-4 where scientists all over the world are conducting research to understand feasibility of using these materials in electronics and optoelectronic components.
This is rapid progress indeed but the jump to TRL 5-6 will require clear understanding of all facets of the device fabrication and integration in order to preserve the figures of merit such as the mobilidy, subthreshold swing, responsivity and luminescence quantum yield.
R&D would therefore need to focus on optimising each step of device fabrication:
- Growth/deposition of 2D materials
This is the first and main step of fabrication and has therefore received the most attention. There are numerous papers reporting the large area deposition of MoS2 and other 2D materials using powder precursors in a furnace. While this is a great first step in producing high quality crystals, there are several unanswered questions regardning the continuity, grain boundary structure and scalability of these films. Metal organic precursor based techniques such as MOCVD and ALD present an attractive to this technique and optimisation of film properties via this method would be critical to the progress of this technology. An aspect in this realm that has not received much attention is the importance of substrates and the influence of stresses in the resulting films on the aforementioned figures of merit.
- Contacts
Scalable deposition of high quality Ohmic contacts is still an unsolved problem that needs careful study to minimise parasitic effects. Successful strategies in the lab involve the deposition pure metal contacts such as Au and Pd under ultra high vacuum or patterning/surface treatment of the area under the contact to create stronger interaction between the inert 2D surface and the metal. This in turn has implications for high frequency operation (fmax) etc. In order to set the challenge, best values of contact resistance on MoS2 are on the order of 700-900 Ohm-micrometer while state-of-the-art Si-MOSFETs with values as low 80 Ohm-micrometer have been reported. An improvement in this figure will certainly go a long way in affecting the next TRL jump.
- Gate dielectric and passivation layers
One of the reasons for the rise of silicon as ubiquitous materials in everyday electronics is the stability of its oxide this is not true of Germanium which as the material used for Schokley transistor. More recently, the ability to deposit thin, high-k dielectrics by techniques such as ALD with extremely low interface density states and high breakdown voltages not only extended the scaling limits for Si-based devices but also enabled the commercialisation of III-V based devices such as HEMTs. The inert nature of van der Waals layers endo them with properties conductive to these applications but this by it’s very nature causes homogeneity and quality problems for the deposition of high-k dielectrics. Several workarounds have been reported ranging from the deposition of a metallic seed layer to functionalisation of the 2D layers which show great promise.
- Etching of 2D materials
While it seems trivial due to its atomically thin structure controlled etch of 2D materials is critical to achieve sophiticated device structures such as LEDs, tunnel transistors or for side contacts to 2D materials. The relatively mature etch technology can therefore be easily tuned to etch stacks of these layers with profiles dictated by the device architecture. At the limit of controlled etching is the emerging field of Atomic Layer Etching (ALE). Significant advances in ALP methods of both conventional and 2D materials would enable further advances in atomic scale devices.
- Metrology and in-line quality control
Important advances in the solutions of the above challenges
