Electrical and electrothermal properties of few-layer 2D devices

While two-dimensional (2D) materials have emerged as a new platform for nanoelectronic devices with improved electronic, optical, and thermal properties, and their heightened sensitivity to electrostatic and mechanical interactions with their environment has proved to be a bottleneck. Few-layer (FL) 2D devices retain the desirable thinness of their monolayer cousins while boosting carrier mobility. Here, we employ an electrothermal model to study FL field-effect devices made from transition metal dichalcogenides MoS2 and WSe2 and examine the effect of both electrical and thermal interlayer resistances, as well as the thermal boundary resistance to the substrate, on device performance. We show that overall conductance improves with increasing thickness (number of layers) at small gate voltages, but exhibits a peak for large gate voltages. Joule heating impacts performance due to relatively poor thermal conductance to the substrate and this impact, along with the location of the hot spot in the FL stack, varies with carrier screening length of the material. We conclude that coupled electrothermal simulation can be employed to design FL 2D devices with improved performance.