Device perspective for black phosphorus field-effect transistors: contact resistance, ambipolar behavior, and scaling

Although monolayer black phosphorus (BP), or phosphorene, has been successfully exfoliated and its optical properties have been explored, most of the electrical performance of the devices is demonstrated on few-layer phosphorene and ultrathin BP films. In this paper, we study the channel length scaling of ultrathin BP field-effect transistors (FETs) and discuss a scheme for using various contact metals to change the transistor characteristics. Through studying transistor behaviors with various channel lengths, the contact resistance can be extracted with the transfer length method (TLM). With different contact metals, we find out that the metal/BP interface has different Schottky barrier heights, leading to a significant difference in contact resistance, which is quite different from previous studies of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as MoS2, where the Fermi level is strongly pinned near the conduction band edge at the metal/MoS2 interface. The nature of BP transistors is Schottky barrier FETs, where the on and off states are controlled by tuning the Schottky barriers at the two contacts. We also observe the ambipolar characteristics of BP transistors with enhanced n-type drain current and demonstrate that the p-type carriers can be easily shifted to n-type or vice versa by controlling the gate bias and drain bias, showing the potential to realize BP CMOS logic circuits.