Recently, large-area growth in a cost-effective way has been realized for several TMDCs via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method ( Pu et al., 2016 Wang et al., 2019 Xu et al., 2019a). Besides, most of the CMOS inverters were made of mechanically exfoliated TMDCs ( Cho et al., 2019 Jeon et al., 2015 Pezeshki et al., 2016), which hinders their reproducible production and large-scale integration in practical application.

They suffered from high power consumption ( Liu et al., 2019 Pu et al., 2016) or large leakage current ( Lin et al., 2014). However, so far, the performance of the reported TMDCs-based CMOS inverters is not satisfactory. Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) inverter, composed of an n-channel and a p-channel FET, has advantage in reducing power consumption and therefore is an important component in integrated circuits. Recently, n-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor inverters ( Wang et al., 2019) and p-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor inverters ( Zhang et al., 2019) based on TMDCs have been reported. Semi-conductive TMDCs, with larger bandgaps, surpass graphene in this aspect. However, because of its gapless nature, graphene is not a good channel material for field-effect transistor (FET), which requires efficient electrostatic control. Graphene, with high conductivity and high carrier mobility, has been extensively studied ( Castro Neto et al., 2009 Flory et al., 2020 Novoselov et al., 2005 Yu et al., 2013). Over the years, two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have stimulated great research enthusiasm, owing to their unique electronic and optoelectronic properties and ultrathin geometry ( Akinwande et al., 2019 Fiori et al., 2014 Liu et al., 2021).

Our work paves the way for the application of 2D TMDCs materials in large-scale low-power-consumption logic circuits. Especially, ultra-low power consumption of ∼0.37 nW is achieved. Complete logic swing and clear dynamic switching behavior are observed in the inverters. The current characteristics of the channel materials are balanced by atomic layer depositing Al 2O 3. In this study, we demonstrate a practical approach to fabricate CMOS inverter arrays using large-area p-MoTe 2 and n-MoS 2, which are grown via chemical vapor deposition method. Besides, most of the inverters were made of mechanically exfoliated materials, which hinders their reproducible production and large-scale integration in practical application. So far, the performance of the reported TMDCs-based CMOS inverters is not satisfactory. Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) inverter is an important component in integrated circuits in view of low power consumption. Two-dimensional (2D) semi-conductive transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have shown advantages for logic application.

Cmos inverter logic