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Monolayer molybdenum disulfide switches for 6G communication systems

Nature Electronics volume 5, pages 367–373 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Atomically thin two-dimensional materials—including transitional metal dichalcogenides and hexagonal boron nitride—can exhibit non-volatile resistive switching. This switching behaviour could be used to create analogue switches for use in high-frequency communication, but has so far been limited to frequencies relevant to the fifth generation of wireless communication technology. Here we show that non-volatile switches made from monolayer molybdenum disulfide in a metal–insulator–metal structure can operate at frequencies corresponding to the sixth-generation communication band (around 100–500 GHz). The switches exhibit low insertion loss in the ON state and high isolation in the OFF state up to 480 GHz with sub-nanosecond pulse switching. We obtain the eye diagrams and constellation diagrams at various data transmission rates and modulations to evaluate the device performance, including real-time data communication up to 100 Gbit s−1 at a carrier frequency of 320 GHz, with a low bit error rate and high signal-to-noise ratio.

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Fig. 1: Material, device structure, and d.c. and pulse switching.
Fig. 2: High-frequency THz performance of MoS2 non-volatile switch.
Fig. 3: Data communication measurements.
Fig. 4: Eye diagrams with different data rates and modulation methods.
Fig. 5: Nonlinearity characteristics of MoS2 RF switches.

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Data availability

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

This work was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (grant N00014-20-1-2104) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (award FA9550-21-1-0460). D.A. acknowledges the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) through the Army Research Office (award W911NF-16-1-0277). The fabrication was partly done at the Texas Nanofabrication Facility supported by NSF grant NNCI-1542159. M.K. acknowledges the UK Brand Research Fund (1.220028.01) of UNIST. E.P. acknowledges funding from the ANR SWIT project (ANR-19-CE24-0004). The data communication setup used for the BER measurements was partially funded by an ANR TERASONIC grant, Contrat de Plan Etat-Region (CPER) Photonics for Society (P4S) and DYDICO cluster of the I-site ULNE. The development of some parts of the setup was also enabled using devices from RENATECH, the French nanofabrication network. The THz communication setup is also supported by the ANR SPATIOTERA project, TERIL-WAVES project, Nano-FUTUR Equipex Program (ANR-21-ESRE-0012) of the ‘Plan d’Investissement d’Avenir (PIA)’ and also supported by the IEMN UHD Flagship and CPER WaveTech@HdF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, South Korea

    Myungsoo Kim

  2. IEMN, University of Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Guillaume Ducournau, Simon Skrzypczak, Henri Happy & Emiliano Pallecchi

  3. Microelectronics Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Sung Jin Yang & Deji Akinwande

  4. Université de Lille, CNRS, UMR 8523—PhLAM—Physique des Lasers Atomes et Molécules, Lille, France

    Pascal Szriftgiser

  5. Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Nicolas Wainstein, Keren Stern & Eilam Yalon

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Contributions

M.K. performed the material transfer, characterization, device fabrication and low-frequency measurements. E.P., G.D. and S.S. contributed to the high-frequency measurements. G.D., E.P. and P.S. conducted the BER, SNR, eye diagram and constellation diagram measurements. N.W., K.S. and E.Y. contributed to the pulse measurement of the MoS2 device. M.K., S.J.Y., E.P., G.D. and D.A. analysed the electrical data and characteristics. All the authors contributed to the article based on the draft written by M.K., E.P., G.D. and D.A. E.Y., E.P., H.H. and D.A. initiated and supervised the collaborative research.

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Correspondence to Emiliano Pallecchi or Deji Akinwande.

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Nature Electronics thanks Mircea Dragoman, Frank Schwierz and Lei Ye for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–11, Notes 1 and 2 and Table 1.

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Measurement demonstration.

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Kim, M., Ducournau, G., Skrzypczak, S. et al. Monolayer molybdenum disulfide switches for 6G communication systems. Nat Electron 5, 367–373 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-022-00766-2

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