Machine Learning to Promote Efficient Screening of Low-Contact Electrode for 2D Semiconductor Transistor Under Limited Data

Abstract

Low-barrier and high-injection electrodes are crucial for high-performance (HP) 2D semiconductor devices. Conventional trial-and-error methodologies for electrode material screening are impractical because of their low efficiency and arbitrary specificity. Although machine learning has emerged as a promising alternative to tackle this problem, its practical application in semiconductor devices is hindered by its substantial data requirements. In this paper, a comprehensive scheme combining an autoencoding regularized adversarial neural network and a feature-adaptive variational active learning algorithm for screening low-contact electrode materials for 2D semiconductor transistors with limited data is proposed. The proposed scheme exhibits exceptional performance by training with only 15% of the total data points, where the mean square errors are 0.17 and 0.27 eV for the vertical and lateral Schottky barrier, respectively, and 2.88% for tunneling probability. Further, it exhibits an optimal predictive performance for 100 randomly sampled training datasets, reveals the underlying physical insight based on the identified features, and realizes continual improvement by employing detailed density-of-states descriptors. Finally, the empirical evaluations of the transport characteristics are conducted and verified by constructing MOSFET devices. These findings demonstrate the considerable potential of machine-learning techniques for screening high-efficiency electrode materials and constructing HP 2D semiconductor devices.