The first one and a half years of the AttoSwitch project has been defined by notable accomplishments in all scientific and management work packages. The project's kick-off meeting (Modena, Italy, February 2024) laid a solid foundation for systematic, effective, and productive collaboration among partners. Initial delays with the hiring procedures have been eventually overcome and the project is now running at full pace in all WPs.
Advanced modelling and simulation frameworks for DFETs and contacts have been developed at different levels of abstraction (from atomistic ab-initio to TCAD and semi-analytical), supporting the project with a portfolio of simulation tools, providing remarkable insights on expected material performance, suggesting new or optimized device structures, enabling to pinpoint some of the fundamental physical limitations.
First versions of processes to deposit/grow, etch, and integrate 2D and 3D Dirac materials with semiconductors have been developed. Processing windows to limit the detrimental effects of PMMA residues, layer delamination, and cleaning procedures have been tested, eventually leading to the successful fabrication of: 1) prototypical Dirac junctions of 2D and 3D Dirac materials with semiconductors; 2) functional transistors with Graphene/MoS2. These devices are currently under scrutiny to identify the limiting factors toward the observation of sub-thermal subthreshold swing. Fabrication of more complex demonstrators with scaled gate dielectric is ongoing.
Advanced TEM/STEM characterizations have provided a wealth of morphological, compositional, structural, and electrostatic information on the newly fabricated 2D and 3D Dirac material samples, thanks to an intense and fruitful collaboration among partners. Valuable insights have been achieved to understand the effectiveness of the processing steps in providing high quality graphene and MoS2 layers, and CoSn crystals. Defect analysis has started and will be further pursued in the future.
Several peer-reviewed journal and conference papers have been published. A very successful inter-EU-project workshop has been organized in Aachen to foster dissemination, networking, and collaboration at European level.
