Van der Waals crystal radio with Pt/MoSe2 Schottky diode and h-BN capacitor for RF energy harvesting

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor-based devices are mostly using in-plane direction current in their device architecture, to justify the novelty of 2D-like ultrathin electron devices beyond conventional 3D devices. Those ultrathin 2D devices, however, would unavoidably meet high contact resistance issue. In the present study, thick 2D-layered crystals are rather chosen for a meaningful vertical device, which alleviates the contact resistance issue using a large contact area. Here, we have fabricated Pt/120 nm-thick MoSe2 Schottky diodes with different Ohmic metal contacts of Au, Ti/Au, and MoTi/Au. These diodes are then monolithically integrated with a capacitor of ~20 nm-thick h-BN or 50 nm-thick ALD Al2O3. This way, van der Waals crystal radios are successfully fabricated for wireless RF energy harvesting. In terms of crystal radio device performance, the best results come from Pt/n-MoSe2 Schottky diode with MoTi contact and h-BN capacitor combination. This superiority is attributed to the excellent Ohmic behavior of MoTi alloy contact. At last, when AM demodulation experiments are conducted with 1 MHz carrier frequency/audio frequency-mixed signals, the crystal radio with MoTi demonstrates the highest output DC voltage envelope, allowing loud audio sound.