Controlling the threshold voltage of a semiconductor field-effect transistor by gating its graphene gate

Abstract

The threshold voltage of a field-effect transistor (FET) determines its switching and limits the scaling of the supply voltage in the logic gates. Here we demonstrate a GaAs FET with a monolayer graphene gate in which the threshold voltage was externally controlled by an additional control gate. The graphene gate forms a Schottky junction with the transistor channel, modulating the channel conductivity. The control gate sets the work function of the graphene gate, controlling the Schottky barrier height and therefore the threshold voltage, and reduces the subthreshold swing down to ~60 mV dec−1. The change of the threshold voltage was large enough to turn the initially depletion mode FETs into the enhancement mode FETs. This allowed to realize logic gates with a positive switching threshold in which the threshold voltage of each transistor was independently set. The presented FETs can also be operated as dual-gate FETs, which was demonstrated by realizing frequency mixers.