UV light modulated synaptic behavior of MoTe₂/BN heterostructure

Electrical synaptic devices are the basic components for the hardware based neuromorphic computational systems, which are expected to break the bottleneck of current von Neumann architecture. So far, synaptic devices based on three-terminal transistors are considered to provide the most stable performance, which usually use gate pulses to modulate the channel conductance through a floating gate and/or charge trapping layer. Herein, we report a three-terminal synaptic device based on a two-dimensional molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe₂)/hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) heterostructure. This structure enables stable and prominent conductance modulation of the MoTe₂channel by the photo-induced doping method through electron migration between the MoTe₂channel and ultraviolet (UV) light excited mid-gap defect states in hBN. Therefore, it is free of the floating gate and charge trapping layer to reduce the thickness and simplify the fabrication/design of the device. Moreover, since UV illumination is indispensable for stable doping in MoTe₂channel, the device can realize both short- (without UV illumination) and long- (with UV illumination) term plasticity. Meanwhile, the introduction of UV light allows additional tunability on the MoTe₂channel conductance through the wavelength and power intensity of incident UV, which may be important to mimic advanced synaptic functions. In addition, the photo-induced doping method can bidirectionally dope MoTe₂channel, which not only leads to large high/low resistance ratio for potential multi-level storage, but also implement both potentiation (n-doping) and depression (p-doping) of synaptic weight. This work explores alternative three-terminal synaptic configuration without floating gate and charge trapping layer, which may inspire researches on novel electrical synapse mechanisms.