Current Rerouting Improves Heat Removal in Few-Layer WSe Devices

Few-layer (FL) transition-metal dichalcogenides have drawn attention for nanoelectronics applications due to their improved mobility, owing to the partial screening of charged impurities at the oxide interface. However, under realistic operating conditions, dissipation leads to self-heating, which is detrimental to electronic and thermal properties. We fabricated a series of FL-WSe₂ devices and measured their I-V characteristics, while their temperatures were quantified by Raman thermometry and simulated from first principles. Our tightly integrated electrothermal study shows that Joule heating leads to a significant layer-dependent temperature rise, which affects mobility and alters the flow of current through the stack. This causes the temperatures in the top layers to increase dramatically, degrading their mobility and causing the current to reroute to the bottom of the FL stack where thermal conductance is higher. We discover that this current rerouting phenomenon improves heat removal because the current flows through layers closer to the substrate, limiting the severity of self-heating and its impact on carrier mobility. We also observe significant lateral heat removal via the contacts because of longer thermal healing length in the top layers and explore the optimum number of layers to maximize mobility in FL devices. Our study will impact future device designs and lead to further improvements in thermal management in van der Waals (vdW)-based devices.