Strain-Based Room-Temperature Non-Volatile MoTe$_2$ Ferroelectric Phase Change Transistor
Abstract
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) MoTe can be reversibly switched with electric-field induced strain between the 1T'-MoTe (semimetallic) phase to a semiconducting MoTe 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 (G/G~10 vs. G/G~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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.07423,
title = {Strain-Based Room-Temperature Non-Volatile MoTe$_2$ Ferroelectric Phase Change Transistor},
author = {Wenhui Hou and Ahmad Azizimanesh and Arfan Sewaket and Tara Peña and Carla Watson and Ming Liu and Hesam Askari and Stephen M. Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.07423},
year = {2019}
}