Electrochemical Protonic Modulation of Monolayer MoS₂ for Programmable Resistors and Dynamically Tunable Transistors

Electrochemical random-access memories (ECRAMs) are promising three-terminal programmable resistors for powering deep neural network hardware accelerators. We investigate ECRAMs with 2H-MoS₂ monolayer as the channel. Our findings demonstrate that the supply of protons to the 2H-MoS₂ channel enables reversible non-volatile conductance modulation with microsecond voltage pulses. The response of the device to the applied gate voltage exhibits both a non-volatile electrochemical effect and a volatile electric field effect. Notably, the programming results in a significant shift of the threshold voltage of the MoS₂ monolayer upon electrochemical gating, allowing for a large range (10⁵) of non-volatile conductance modulation at a constant back gate voltage. The observed threshold voltage shift suggests that the hydrogen supplied to the MoS₂ and its surrounding interfaces increases the n-type doping of the channel. This work opens up new possibilities for the development of programmable resistors and tunable transistors with potential applications in hardware neural networks and other in-memory computation architectures.