Functional two-dimensional materials for the Angstrom technology era

Our eternal desire to control material crystallinity, structure, and morphology has enabled versatile functional components throughout time. For the semiconductor industry, this creativity leads to many novel and disruptive materials being introduced in future device architectures to enable functional scaling for systems on chip, in addition to dimensional scaling.  

Nano-engineered two-dimensional materials present one of the newest kids on the semiconductor block. They display a unique anisotropy in their material structure, symmetry, reactivity, and properties while only being few atoms thick. By imec’s logic scaling roadmap, they could be integrated at different levels in the integrated circuit to enrich existing silicon technologies pushing the device roadmap into the Angstrom technology era.  

However, as opposed to conventional three-dimensional materials used in the industry, atomically thin two-dimensional materials interact with their surroundings through molecular van der Waals forces. They are therefore highly prone to atomic-scale interactions with the surrounding materials and conventional processes used in integrated device schemes. Introducing two-dimensional materials to industry-standard silicon platforms presents a paradigm shift for integrated device manufacturing and brings forth challenges and opportunities.  

At imec, we gain fundamental insight on how to design atomically controlled and manufacturable processes for integrating two-dimensional materials in functional logic devices, and how to characterize changes in their interfacial structures.