Aaron Franklin
Duke University, NC·Engineering
Silicon transistors are nearing their physical size limits. Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, which are crystals only a few atoms thick, could keep chips shrinking.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Physics
- Topics
2D semiconductors
two-dimensional materials
transition metal dichalcogenides
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Build an apparatus for nanoscale thermal mapping to measure how heat builds up and flows at metal contacts to 2D semiconductor transistors.
- Fabricate mono-, bi- and trilayer tungsten disulfide transistors with top, edge and mixed contact structures, and measure their electrical and thermal behavior with different elemental metals.
- Validate ab initio models of electron and phonon (heat-carrying vibration) transport through contacts against measured tungsten disulfide device data from Duke.
- Demonstrate tungsten disulfide transistors with improved performance: low contact resistance, high thermal boundary conductance and little device-to-device variability.
More about the research
One obstacle is where metal wires meet these thin materials. As these metal contacts get smaller, they may heat up and change how electricity flows, and very little is known about these thermal effects. Because heat is critical in densely packed chips, understanding it is necessary before 2D transistors can be used in real circuits.
Why it matters
Chip makers need ways to keep shrinking transistors once silicon reaches its limits. Contacts to tungsten disulfide that resist current less, move heat away well and behave consistently could help 2D semiconductors become practical in mainstream integrated circuits. Design guidelines for such contacts could support future electronics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jivtesh Garg
University of Oklahoma, OK·Engineering
Test whether evanescent electric fields across 2–4 Å interfacial gaps help acoustic phonons, the lattice vibrations that carry heat, cross GaN–diamond interfaces, using atomistic Green's function calculations.
Jonathan Bird
University at Buffalo, NY·Engineering
Build non-volatile transistors that combine a voltage-switched magneto-electric gate with a channel made of transition-metal dichalcogenides, two-dimensional semiconductors only atoms thick, and show they retain their programmed state without power.
Yan Wang
University of Nevada-Reno, NV·Engineering·Early-career
Determine how wave-like phonons, atomic vibrations that carry heat, travel, scatter and become trapped in periodic, quasi-periodic and aperiodic structures, combining spectral phonon analysis with phonon spectroscopy.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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