Novel Plasma Technology for 2D material processes.

The need to acquire and process gigantic datasets assumes producing faster and smaller transistors, thus requiring a rapid growth of the semiconductor technology. Current silicon (Si) based field effect transistors (FETs) are approaching the dimensions of a few atoms, which degrades their functionality due to the short-channel effect. Recently, two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor materials like Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have shown extensive potential as an alternative for current Si-based transistors. However, to fully harness the superior properties of 2D TMDCs in practical applications several important drawbacks concerning contact, doping and charge carrier transport should be overcome. In general, semiconductor processing makes use of plasma processes. Plasma processing allows a large variety of nanoscale modifications, with high throughput that could be effective to treat 2D TMDCs materials at various stages of device fabrication. To effectively exploit the full potential and understand the limitations of plasma’s in processing 2D TMDCs, considerable efforts are still required before promoting this technology. The ambition of this PhD project is to develop novel plasma methods for etching, cleaning, doping and defect engineering of 2D TMDCs materials, aiming at improved processability and better device characteristics (performance).