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Graphene-assisted metal transfer printing for wafer-scale integration of metal electrodes and two-dimensional materials

Nature Electronics volume 5, pages 275–280 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Metal–semiconductor junctions are essential components in electronic and optoelectronic devices. With two-dimensional semiconductors, conventional metal deposition via ion bombardment results in chemical disorder and Fermi-level pinning. Transfer printing techniques—in which metal electrodes are predeposited and transferred to create van der Waals junctions—have thus been developed, but the predeposition of metal electrodes creates chemical bonds on the substrate, which makes subsequent transfer difficult. Here we report a graphene-assisted metal transfer printing process that can be used to form van der Waals contacts between two-dimensional materials and three-dimensional metal electrodes. We show that arrays of metal electrodes with both weak (copper, silver and gold) and strong (platinum, titanium and nickel) adhesion strengths can be delaminated from a four-inch graphene wafer due to its weak van der Waals force and absence of dangling bonds, and transfer printed onto different substrates (graphene, molybdenum disulfide and silicon dioxide). We use this approach to create molybdenum disulfide field-effect transistors with different printed metal electrodes, allowing the Schottky barrier height to be tuned and ohmic and Schottky contacts to be formed. We also demonstrate the batch production of molybdenum disulfide transistor arrays with uniform electrical characteristics.

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Fig. 1: Illustration and optical images of the graphene-assisted metal transfer printing process.
Fig. 2: Au patterns transferred onto different substrates.
Fig. 3: Contact properties of MoS2 transistors with vdW-integrated 3D metals.
Fig. 4: Electrical properties of the MoS2 back-gated FET array with transferred Ag contacts.

Data availability

Source data are provided with this paper. The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 51925208, 61974157 and 61851401); Key Research Project of Frontier Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (QYZDB-SSW-JSC021); National Science and Technology Major Project (2016ZX02301003); Science and Technology Innovation Action Plan of Shanghai Science and Technology Committee (20501130700); Strategic Priority Research Program (B) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB30030000); and Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (19JC1415500 and 21JC1406100).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Guanyu Liu, Ziao Tian.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Guanyu Liu, Ziao Tian, Zhongying Xue, Miao Zhang, Xudong Hu, Yuekun Yang & Zengfeng Di

  2. Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Guanyu Liu, Xudong Hu & Yuekun Yang

  3. State Key Laboratory for Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and School of Physics and Electronics, Hunan University, Changsha, China

    Zhenyu Yang & Lei Liao

  4. State Key Laboratory for Infrared Physics, Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Yang Wang & Weida Hu

  5. Department of Physics, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, China

    Paul K. Chu

  6. Department of Materials Science, State Key Laboratory of ASIC and System, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Yongfeng Mei

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Contributions

Z.D. and W.H. conceived the project. G.L. and Z.T. fabricated the samples and performed the measurements. Z.Y. and L.L. contributed to the transfer printing method. Z.X. and M.Z. contributed to the wafer-scale transfer. X.H. and Y.Y. performed the Raman measurements. Y.W. and W.H. contributed to the electrical measurements. P.K.C. and Y.M. contributed to the data analysis and manuscript revision. Z.D., Z.T. and G.L. wrote the manuscript. All the authors discussed the results and contributed to the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Weida Hu or Zengfeng Di.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Electronics thanks Soon-Yong Kwon, Chengyan Xu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–14 and Tables 1 and 2.

Supplementary Data 1

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Liu, G., Tian, Z., Yang, Z. et al. Graphene-assisted metal transfer printing for wafer-scale integration of metal electrodes and two-dimensional materials. Nat Electron 5, 275–280 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-022-00764-4

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