Two-Dimensional Semiconductor Device Technology

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor device technology exploits materials of atomic thickness to achieve unprecedented control over electronic, optical and mechanical properties. By reducing channel dimensions to one or a few atomic layers, charge carriers are confined in ultrathin planes, leading to high electrostatic gating efficiency, strong light–matter interaction and suppressed short-channel effects. Prominent examples include transition metal dichalcogenides such as molybdenum disulfide and tungsten diselenide, black phosphorus and novel group-III chalcogenides. These materials can be grown by chemical vapour deposition or isolated by mechanical exfoliation, then transferred onto arbitrary substrates to form field-effect transistors, photodetectors, memdevices and logic circuits. Key challenges remain in achieving uniform large-area synthesis, low-resistance contacts, reliable dielectric integration and statistical control of device yield and variability. Recent advances have demonstrated sub-1 V operation, flexible integrated circuits, van der Waals heterostructures and on-chip security primitives, pointing to a future in which 2D semiconductors complement or extend silicon, enabling low-power electronics, wearable sensors and distributed computation in the Internet of Things.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have demonstrated that wafer-scale monolayer molybdenum disulfide can be integrated with ultrathin high-κ dielectrics and metal gates to yield flexible and rigid thin-film transistors capable of deep-subthreshold operation and near-ideal subthreshold slopes. The resulting large-scale flexible integrated circuits operate below 1 V, with negligible hysteresis and on/off ratios exceeding 10^7, highlighting a path to energy-efficient wearable and implantable electronics. In parallel, fully monolithic arrays of two-dimensional memtransistors have been used to build bio-inspired cryptographic engines at the sensor edge. Each low-power engine encodes data securely with only picojoule-scale energy per operation, demonstrating near-sensor security for Internet-of-Things nodes without external cryptographic hardware. Furthermore, a comprehensive appraisal of 2D materials for heterogeneous electronics analyses the bottlenecks that have so far hindered full chip integration, and proposes strategies in interface engineering, thermal management and large-area synthesis that could unlock practical applications in computing, sensing and photonics.

Two-Dimensional Semiconductor Device Technology publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in two-dimensional semiconductor device technology across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Two-dimensional material: A crystal consisting of one or a few atomic layers with strong in-plane bonds and weak out-of-plane interactions.

Field-effect transistor (FET): A device in which an electric field modulates the conductivity of a semiconducting channel between source and drain electrodes.

Van der Waals integration: Assembly of layered materials relying on non-covalent forces to stack dissimilar crystals without lattice matching.

Schottky barrier: Potential energy barrier for carriers at a metal–semiconductor junction that influences current injection.

Fermi-level pinning: The phenomenon in which surface states fix the energy of the Fermi level at an interface, limiting control over barrier height.

Monolayer: A single atomic layer of a material, often corresponding to its thinnest stable form.

References

1. Low power flexible monolayer MoS2 integrated circuits. Nature Communications (2023).
2. All-in-one, bio-inspired, and low-power crypto engines for near-sensor security based on two-dimensional memtransistors. Nature Communications (2022).
3. 2D materials for future heterogeneous electronics. Nature Communications (2022).
4. The Roadmap of 2D Materials and Devices Toward Chips. Nano-Micro Letters (2024).
5. Universal transfer of full‐class metal electrodes for barrier‐free two‐dimensional semiconductor contacts. InfoMat (2023).
6. Next‐generation machine vision systems incorporating two‐dimensional materials: Progress and perspectives. InfoMat (2021).