A delegation of the EU Commission has paid a visit to AMO GmbH, within the broader context of a site-visit at RWTH Aachen University. Theme of the visit was the role of universities in contributing to the competitiveness and prosperity of Europe, and what the EU can do to foster their future development. [read more »]
Stability – in the sense of stable operation thorough lifetime – is one of the key characteristics that an electronic device need to present to be suitable for applications. And it is the Achilles heel of transistors based on two-dimensional materials, which typically show much worse stability than devices based on silicon. A team of researchers from TU Wien, AMO GmbH, RWTH Aachen University and Wuppertal University has now demonstrated a novel engineering approach to enhance the electrical stability of two-dimensional transistors by carefully tuning the Fermi energy. The results have been reported in Nature Electronics.
Today, there is little doubt that devices based on graphene and other two-dimensional (2D) materials can exceed the state of the art for certain applications, thanks to their intrinsic properties. Two-dimensional materials are also seen as some of the most promising candidates for realizing ultimately scaled transistors at the end of the roadmap of silicon technology. However, devices based on 2D materials often show poor electrical stability, meaning that their behavior changes depending on their operation history.
“Component reliability is one aspect that is often neglected in research, but where we have been working for several years, because it is of central importance for applications.” explains Professor Max Lemme, scientific director of AMO GmbH and Head of the Chair of Electronic Devices at RWTH. The instability is not only caused by 2D materials themselves, but mostly by charges trapped into the oxide-insulator used to fabricate the transistors. “Ideally, one would like to use a different insulator with fewer charge traps,” says Lemme, “but there are no scalable solutions for this yet. In our work, we have shown instead that it is possible to use a standard insulator such as aluminum oxide and to significantly suppress the adverse effects of the charge traps in the oxide, by adjusting the charge carrier density in the 2D material.”
The work combines a thorough theoretical analysis of the novel approach – dubbed by the authors ‘stability-based design’ – and a proof of principle demonstration of the concept, performed by measuring different types of graphene-based FETs. The key idea of the approach is to try to engineer the combination 2D-material/insulator in such a way that the energy of the charge traps in the insulator is as different as possible from the one of the charge carriers in the 2D material. Lemme explains: “Graphene based FETs were the ideal test bed for our approach, as it is relatively easy to tune the energy of charge carriers in graphene. The approach, however, is applicable to all FETs based on 2D semiconductors”. These results represent a major step forward towards stable and reliable 2D materials transistors to be integrated in semiconductor technology.
Bibliographic information:
T. Knobloch, B. Uzlu, Y. Yu. I.llarionov, Z. Wang, M. Otto, L. Filipovic, M. Waltl, D. Neumaier, M. C. Lemme, T. Grasser, Improving stability in two-dimensional transistors with amorphous gate oxides by Fermi-level tuning, Nature Electronics (2022) – Open Access
DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00768-0
AMO GmbH warmly welcome Dr. Tauheed Mohammad, from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India. Dr. Mohammad will be spending a one-year research staying at AMO with a post-doctoral industrial fellowship of the Indo-German Science & Technology Center (IGSTC). [read more »]
AMO warmly congratulates Anna Lena Giesecke for her double appointment as Professor for Semiconductor Technology at the University of Duisburg-Essen and as group leader at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems (Fraunhofer IMS). [read more »]
After a two-year break due to the pandemic, the Girls’ Day could finally take place again in presence. AMO took this opportunity to introduce seven young girls to the broad field of nanotechnology. [read more »]
AMO is co-organizing an exciting workshop together with the University of Bristol, within the framework of the ZeroAMP project. The workshop will take place on June 30, 2022, at Clifton Hill House in Bristol, and it will showcase the novel technology developed within the ZeroAMP project, as well as insightful talks by external speakers.
A long interview with Michael Hornung, AMO’s Managing Director, has just been published on Novus Light Technologies Today. [read more »]
In March, AMO has officially joined the SiNANO Institute – the European Academic and Scientific Association for Nanoelectronics. [read more »]
The latest issue of AMO’s magazine nanovate! has just been published.
Check out the latest on:
– AMO’s activities on perovskites for integrated photonics
– an introduction to the project NEUROTEC on Neuromorphic Computing coordinated by Rainer Waser, with FZ Jülich, RWTH Aachen University, Aixtron, AMOTRONICS, and others
– a sentimental goodbye to our (dismantled) wind turbine and what we will do to mitigate our sustainability
….and much more
Enjoy the reading!
In a compact comment published in Nature Communications, Max Lemme and colleagues outline the most promising fields of applications of two-dimensional (2D) materials, as well as the challenges that still need to be solved to see the appearance of high-tech products enabled by 2D-materials. [read more »]