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2D materials

Silicene transistors

Nature Nanotechnology volume 10, pages 202–203 (2015)Cite this article

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Artificially synthesized silicene — an atomically thin layer of silicon — is set to rival natural layered materials in the development of field-effect transistors.

Since the creation of the first integrated circuit in 1958, the electronics industry has pursued smaller, faster and cheaper devices. Moore's law, which predicts that the number of transistors in a semiconductor chip roughly doubles every 18 months, will break as the dimensions of the key electronic device, the field-effect transistor (FET), reaches the low nanometre range. At present, approaches that use materials such as strained Si–Ge films and dielectrics with a high dielectric constant are being investigated to fabricate FETs with gate lengths smaller than 10 nm. New device concepts such as FETs based on nanowires are also envisaged. However, more disruptive routes must be explored to push the downscaling towards transistors with gate lengths of 5 nm. To this end, the use of 2D structures in the active channel of the transistor could be essential1.

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Figure 1: Atomic structure of silicene.
Figure 2: Schematic of a back-gated FET with a silicene channel and with source/drain contacts defined in the native silver film.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guy Le Lay is at the Laboratoire de Physique des Interactions Ioniques et Moléculaires, Campus de Saint Jérôme, 13397 Marseille Cedex, France,

    Guy Le Lay

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Le Lay, G. Silicene transistors. Nature Nanotech 10, 202–203 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2015.10

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