PtSe₂ Field-Effect Transistors: New Opportunities for Electronic Devices

PtSe₂, a new family of transition metal dichalcogenides, has been explored for electronic device applications using density functional theory and non-equilibrium Green's function within the third nearest neighbor tight-binding approximation. Interestingly, despite its small effective mass (me as low as 0.21m0; m0 being electron rest mass), PtSe₂ has large density of states due to its unique six-valley conduction band within the first Brillouin zone, unlike MoX₂ family. This has direct impacts on the device characteristics of PtSe₂ field-effect transistors, resulting in superior on-state performance (30% higher on current and transconductance) as compared with the MoSe₂ counterpart. Our simulation shows that the PtSe₂ device with a channel longer than 15 nm exhibits near-ideal subthreshold swing, and sub-100 mV/V of drain-induced barrier lowering can be achieved with an aggressively scaled gate oxide, demonstrating new opportunities for electronic devices with novel PtSe₂.