Two-dimensional (2D) indium selenides have emerged as an attractive materials platform for information processing by unifying semiconducting transport with switchable ferroelectric polarization within a single system. Their intrinsically high carrier ...
Two-dimensional (2D) indium selenides have emerged as an attractive materials platform for information processing by unifying semiconducting transport with switchable ferroelectric polarization within a single system. Their intrinsically high carrier mobility enables high-performance field-effect transistor (FET) operation, while ferroelectricity persisting down to the monolayer limit offers a fundamentally scalable route to nanoscale memory and logic. Despite these advantages, the synthesis of indium selenides has remained challenging, as small formation-energy differences among multiple polymorphs complicate phase control and hinder the realization of high-quality, uniform, large-area single-phase films. This dissertation presents a comprehensive study spanning the phase-controlled synthesis, ferroelectric characterization, and device integration of ferroelectric indium selenides, culminating in array-scale ferroelectric semiconductor transistors.
Chapter 2 introduces a hypotaxy-based growth strategy that enables deterministic phase control in indium selenides through 2D template-guided crystallization and nanopore-mediated chalcogen delivery. By employing graphene as a 2D template, large area, single crystalline β’-In2Se3 films with precise stoichiometric control are synthesized. Furthermore, by modulating the annealing duration, a controlled phase transformation from β’-In2Se3 to γ-InSe is achieved, allowing selective synthesis of either ferroelectric phase according to targeted material and device characteristics.
Chapter 3 systematically investigates ferroelectric mechanisms and properties of hypotaxially synthesized β’-In2Se3 and γ-InSe. Both phases exhibit robust, field-reversible ferroelectricity over large areas with clearly resolved in-plane and out-of-plane switching. β’-In2Se3 is distinguished by a relatively low coercive electric field, whereas γ-InSe delivers a large remnant polarization, reaching the highest experimentally reported values among ferroelectric semiconductors. These contrasting characteristics highlight the ability of hypotaxy to tailor ferroelectric responses through phase selection.
Chapter 4 leverages hypotaxially synthesized γ-InSe to implement ferroelectric semiconductor field-effect transistors (FeS-FETs). The resulting devices combine high-performance field-effect transport, with an highest mobility achieving 377 cm2V-1s-1 and a large non-volatile memory window of up to 125 V, together with stable and programmable resistance contrast sustained over 107 switching cycles and 3.3×104 s. Beyond single-device demonstrations, this work advances FeS-FETs to the array level by realizing a 70-device FeS-FET array exhibiting tightly clustered transfer characteristics and narrow statistical distributions of key performance metrics.
Collectively, this dissertation establishes hypotaxy as a general route to phase-engineered 2D ferroelectrics and demonstrates that hypotaxially synthesized γ-InSe enables uniform, high-performance ferroelectric semiconductor devices and arrays. These findings bridge materials-level phase control with device-scale integration and provide a foundation for scalable ferroelectric semiconductor electronics and in-memory computing architectures.