Transport Properties of a MoS₂/WSe₂ Heterojunction Transistor and Its Potential for Application

• Main Authors: Nourbakhsh, Amirhasan (Contributor), Zubair, Ahmad (Contributor), Dresselhaus, Mildred (Contributor), Palacios, Tomas (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microsystems Technology Laboratories (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Chemical Society (ACS), 2017-09-01T19:37:34Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 This paper studies band-to-band tunneling in the transverse and lateral directions of van der Waals MoS₂/WSe₂ heterojunctions. We observe room-temperature negative differential resistance (NDR) in a heterojunction diode comprised of few-layer WSe₂ stacked on multilayer MoS₂. The presence of NDR is attributed to the lateral band-to-band tunneling at the edge of the MoS₂/WSe₂ heterojunction. The backward tunneling diode shows an average conductance slope of 75 mV/dec with a high curvature coefficient of 62 V-1. Associated with the tunnel-diode characteristics, a positive-to-negative transconductance in the MoS₂/WSe₂ heterojunction transistors is observed. The transition is induced by strong interlayer coupling between the films, which results in charge density and energy-band modulation. The sign change in transconductance is particularly useful for multivalued logic (MVL) circuits, and we therefore propose and demonstrate for the first time an MVL-inverter that shows three levels of logic using one pair of p-type transistors.