Leveraging our prior work on silicene and germanene, the “cousins of graphene” in past FP7 FET Open project 2DNANOLATTICES (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/270749), the ESSL lab explores a new material in the form of a single layer sp²-hybridized SiC honeycomb lattice. The new 2D material is expected to inherit the stability of Graphene but due to the breaking of the sublattice symmetry, it is predicted to possess an energy gap which makes it the thinnest stable semiconductor that could possibly exist. The material enables the ultimate channel thickness scaling and miniaturization of digital electronic devices with minimum short channel effects and reduced leakage. It could also provide solutions for silicon (quantum) photonic integrated circuits. 

The ESSL/INN team as coordinators of the 2D ENGINE project (https://www.2dengine.eu/) of the Graphene Flagship initiative  (https://graphene-flagship.eu/) are actively involved in the engineering of the single layer SiC honeycomb, employing liquid metal catalyst (LMCat) growth technology with the prospect to obtain free standing transferable ultrathin SiC layers for heterogeneous integration with Si circuits. Moreover, within 2D ENGINE project, the ESSL team will fabricate ferroelectric twisted bilayer films from 2D h-BN or h-AlN and will combine them with ultrathin insulator barrier layers to form the first ferroelectric tunnel junction of its kind, targeting ultralow power resistive memories.