Field-Effect Tunneling Transistor Based on Vertical Graphene Heterostructures

By L. Britnell, R. Gorbachev, R. Jalil, B. Belle, F. Schedin, A. Mishchenko, T. Georgiou, M. Katsnelson, L. Eaves, S. Morozov and 5 more. Science, 2011

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Tunnel Barriers for Graphene Transistors Transistor operation for integrated circuits not only requires that the gate material has high-charge carrier mobility, but that there is also an effective way of creating a barrier to current flow so that the device can be switched off and not waste power. Graphene offers high carrier mobility, but the shape of its conduction and valence bands enables electron tunneling and makes it difficult to achieve low currents in an “off” state. Britnell et al. (p. 947, published online 2 February) have fabricated field-effect transistors in which a thin tunneling barrier created from a layered material—either hexagonal boron nitride or molybdenum disulfide—is sandwiched between graphene sheets. These devices exhibit on-off switching ratios of ≈50 and ≈10,000, respectively, at room temperature. Boron nitride or molybdenum disulfide layers sandwiched between graphene sheets act as tunneling barriers to minimize device leakage currents. An obstacle to the use of graphene as an alternative to silicon electronics has been the absence of an energy gap between its conduction and valence bands, which makes it difficult to achieve low power dissipation in the OFF state. We report a bipolar field-effect transistor that exploits the low density of states in graphene and its one-atomic-layer thickness. Our prototype devices are graphene heterostructures with atomically thin boron nitride or molybdenum disulfide acting as a vertical transport barrier. They exhibit room-temperature switching ratios of ≈50 and ≈10,000, respectively. Such devices have potential for high-frequency operation and large-scale integration.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/090563ffbbe4425d9a2cf3099e492689d7d767d7

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Citations in the corpus

Few-layer MoS2: a promising layered semiconductor. (2014, methodology): “While purely MoS2 devices have been gaining attraction, there have also been advances in designing heterostructures which use other materials like graphene in conjunction with MoS2 in pursuit of novel devices utilizing the unique properties ofmore than just onematerial.223 One of the first heterostr”
Progress, challenges, and opportunities in two-dimensional materials beyond graphene. (2013, background): “Additionally, tunneling field-effect transistors made from graphene/BN or graphene/MoS2 heterostructures have been demonstrated to have high on/off ratios (up to 10 000).(171) While these heterostruc-”