An increase in power consumption necessitates a low-power circuit technology to extend Moore’s law. Low-power transistors, such as tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs), negative-capacitance field-effect transistors (NC-FETs), and Dirac-source field-effect transistors (DS-FETs), have been realised to break the thermionic limit of the subthreshold swing (SS). However, a low-power rectifier, able to overcome the thermionic limit of an ideality factor (η) of 1 at room temperature, has not been proposed yet. In this study, we have realised a DS diode based on graphene/MoS2/graphite van der Waals heterostructures, which exhibits a steep-slope characteristic curve, by exploiting the linear density of states (DOSs) of graphene. For the developed DS diode, we obtained η < 1 for more than four decades of drain current (ηave_4dec < 1) with a minimum value of 0.8, and a rectifying ratio exceeding 108. The realisation of a DS diode represents an additional step towards the development of low-power electronic circuits.
Today's circuit technology requires low-power transistors and diodes to extend Moore's law. While research has been focused on reducing power consumption of transistors, low-power diodes have not been widely studied. Here, we report a low-power, thus steep-slope Schottky diode, with a “cold metal” source. The Schottky barrier between metal electrode and bulk MoS2 enabled the diode behavior, and the steep-slope diode IV curve originated from the change in the density of states of a graphite (cold metal) source with a bias voltage. The MoS2 Schottky diode with a cold metal exhibits an ideality factor (η) < 1 for more than four decades of drain current with a sizable rectifying ratio (108). The realization of a steep-slope Schottky diode paves the way to the improvement in low-power circuit technology.
An increase in power consumption necessitates a low-power circuit technology to extend Moore’s law. Low-power transistors, such as tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs)1-5, negative-capacitance field-effect transistors (NC-FETs)6, and Dirac-source field-effect transistors (DS-FETs)7-10, have been realised to break the thermionic limit of the subthreshold swing (SS). However, a low-power diode rectifier, which breaks the thermionic limit of an ideality factor (η) of 1 at room temperature, has not been proposed yet. In this study, we have realised a DS diode, which exhibits a steep-slope characteristic curve, by utilising the linear density of states (DOSs) of graphene7. For the developed DS diode, η < 1 for more than two decades of drain current with a minimum value of 0.8, and the rectifying ratio is large (> 105). The realisation of a DS diode paves the way for the development of low-power electronic circuits.
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