High Yield MoS2 Electronics: Technology, Circuits and Application

In the last few decades, the device community has explored a large number of technologies beyond silicon, that not only allow for further shrinkage in electronic systems size and power but can also provide new features, such as mechanical flexibility, large area coverage at low cost and simplified 3D integration. Two-dimensional electronics based on single-layer MoS₂ synthesized by chemical vapor deposition offers significant advantages for realizing large-scale flexible systems owing to the ultrathin nature, excellent transport properties and stable crystalline structure of MoS₂.

Despite all the progress, the MoS₂ electronics demonstrated so far is limited to single or few-device-scale circuits build on exfoliated flakes due to the many challenges associated with the uniformity and yield control in both material growth and device fabrication. This thesis addresses issues which are crucial for realizing reliable, high yield complex circuits using emerging 2D material, MoS₂ : (1) Develop large area material synthesis and transfer methods , as well as some of the first technologies for reliable enhancement mode MoS2 transistors. (2) Design a scalable PDK for MoS2 and implemented both digital circuits (combinational and sequential logics) and analog circuits (power management circuits).(3) Study the impact of devices variability to circuit yield and improve the yield to 100% with circuits of 10k transistors after material, devices and circuits co-optimization. (4) Demonstrate two practical applications using CVD MoS₂: active matrix backplane circuits for transparent display and radio frequency energy harvester. (5) Demonstrate the first air stable CMOS technology monolithically integrated on WSe₂ to offer low power electronic solution.

This thesis has, in summary, provided important guidelines on how to take a new proof-of-concept material/device and make it into a useful technology to enable practical applications.