Layer-dependent semiconductor-metal transition of SnO/Si(001) heterostructure and device application

As the downscaling of electronic devices continues, the problems of leakage currents and heat dissipation become more and more serious. To address these issues, new materials and new structures are explored. Here, we propose an interesting heterostructure made of ultrathin SnO layers on Si(001) surface. Our first-principle calculations show that a single layer of SnO on Si(001) surface is a semiconductor, but a bilayer SnO on the same surface is metallic. This metal-semiconductor dichotomy allows construction of single-2D-material-based electronic devices with low contact resistance and low leakage currents. In particular, due to the interaction between Sn and the Si substrate, the semiconducting monolayer-SnO/Si(001) has a highly anisotropic band structure with a much lighter hole effective mass along one direction than that of Si and most other 2D materials, indicating a high carrier mobility. Furthermore, by combining density functional theory and nonequilibrium Green’s function method, we directly investigate the transport characteristics of a field effect transistor based on the proposed heterostructures, which shows very low contact resistance, negligible leakage current, and easy gate control at a compact channel length.