Over the past few years, engineers have been working on alternative hardware designs that combine computation and data storage in a single device. These emerging electronics, known as computing-in-memory devices, offer several advantages such as faster speeds and improved data analysis capabilities.
A team of researchers from National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and National Cheng Kung University recently developed an effective strategy to achieve switchable electric polarization in molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). They outlined this method in a Nature Electronics paper and successfully created promising ferroelectric transistors for computing-in-memory applications.
“During our research, we unexpectedly discovered numerous parallel-distributed domain boundaries in our MoS2 flakes, coinciding with the experimental confirmation of sliding ferroelectricity in 2D materials,” said Tilo H Yang, co-author of the paper, in an interview with Phys.org. “This discovery inspired us to explore whether this domain-boundary-rich MoS2 could be utilized for the development of ferroelectric memory.”
The main objective of Yang and his colleagues’ study was to find a method to directly synthesize epitaxial MoS2 with sliding ferroelectricity. The fabrication strategy they identified allowed them to create promising new ferroelectric transistors with advantageous characteristics.
“An important step in fabricating our ferroelectric transistors is incorporating the 3R-MoS2 channel into a switchable ferroelectric material during the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth process,” explained Yang. ”The formation of domain boundaries in 3R-MoS2 films is necessary to enable the switching of polarized domains, but this is rare in most epitaxial 3R MoS2 films. In the paper, we presented a synthesis strategy to increase the likelihood of domain boundaries appearing in the material, giving it the ability to flip domains in response to the gate voltage.”
2023-12-25 23:00:08
Link from phys.org rnrn