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Programmable devices based on reversible solid-state doping of two-dimensional semiconductors with superionic silver iodide

Nature Electronics volume 3, pages 630–637 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors are attractive for electronic devices with atomically thin channels. However, controlling the electronic properties of the 2D materials by incorporating impurity dopants is inherently difficult due to the limited physical space in the atomically thin lattices. Here we show that a solid-state ionic doping approach can be used to tailor the carrier type in 2D semiconductors and create programmable devices. Our strategy exploits a superionic phase transition in silver iodide to induce switchable ionic doping. We create few-layer tungsten diselenide (WSe2) devices that can be reversibly transformed into transistors with reconfigurable carrier types and into diodes with switchable polarities by controllably poling the van der Waals integrated silver iodide above the superionic phase transition temperature. We also construct complementary logic gates by integrating and programming identical transistors, and show that the programmed functions can be erased by an external trigger (temperature or ultraviolet irradiation) to create the temporary and delible electronics that are desirable for electronic security.

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Fig. 1: Illustrations of the WSe2 FET integrated with the AgI microplate.
Fig. 2: Type-switchable WSe2 FETs programmed by AgI.
Fig. 3: Polarity-switchable WSe2 diodes and photodiodes programmed by AgI.
Fig. 4: Reconfigurable logic gates and delible electronic functions.

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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

X.D. acknowledges support from the Office of Naval Research through award no. N00014-18-1-2707. Y.H. acknowledges financial support from the Office of Naval Research through award no. N00014-18-1-2491. B.D. acknowledges support from the Office of Naval Research through award no. N00014-16-1-2164. I.S. acknowledges support from the International Scientific Partnership Program at King Saud University (ISPP-148). Y.Z. acknowledges support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China through grant no. 2018YFA0703503. We acknowledge the Electron Imaging Centre at UCLA for TEM technical support and the Nanoelectronics Research Facility at UCLA for device fabrication technical support. We thank H.-C. Cheng, Y.-C. Huang, H. Wu, C. Wang, C. Choi, Z. Zhao, Z. Huang, G. Zhong, P. Wang and J.-W. Lee for their help in the laboratory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Sung-Joon Lee, Jin Huang, Christopher S. Choi, Yuan Liu, Jian Guo, Bruce Dunn & Yu Huang

  2. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Zhaoyang Lin, Peng Chen, Chuancheng Jia, Yiliu Wang, Laiyuan Wang & Xiangfeng Duan

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

    Peng Chen & Xidong Duan

  4. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Materials Genome Engineering, Beijing Key Laboratory for Advanced Energy Materials and Technologies, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China

    Qingliang Liao & Yue Zhang

  5. Sustainable Energy Technologies Centre, College of Engineering, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

    Imran Shakir

  6. California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yu Huang & Xiangfeng Duan

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  1. Sung-Joon Lee
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Contributions

X.D. and Y.H. designed and supervised the research. S.-J.L. conducted most of the experiments and analysed the data. J.H. conducted the XRD and TEM experiments, and C.S.C. and B.D. conducted the AgI ionic conductivity measurements. Z.L., P.C., Y.L., J.G., C.J., Y.W., L.W., Q.L., I.S., X.D.D. and Y.Z. contributed materials, material characterizations, device fabrications or data analysis. X.D. and S.-J.L. wrote the manuscript with input from all co-authors. All authors reviewed and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yu Huang or Xiangfeng Duan.

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

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Lee, SJ., Lin, Z., Huang, J. et al. Programmable devices based on reversible solid-state doping of two-dimensional semiconductors with superionic silver iodide. Nat Electron 3, 630–637 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00472-x

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