A team of researchers from Korea and Japan have had a breakthrough with a semiconductor material that they claim could be a candidate to replace silicon in future electronics. In the 7 August issue of Science they report the creation of a transistor where the channel consists of layers of a two-dimensional material molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe2).
Everyone’s on the lookout for a replacement for silicon, because, great as it is, it has two drawbacks: its electronic properties degrade when the silicon layer is thinned to just one or a few atoms thick, and its indirect bandgap make it difficult to use silicon in optoelectronics, explains Heejun Yang, a physicist at Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea, who led the research.
One class of candidate materials that researchers have been examining are transition metal dichacogenides, which include molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide. But making good electrical connections between these materials and metal contacts has been a problem.
