Near-thermal limit gating in heavily doped III-V semiconductor nanowires using polymer electrolytes

Doping is a common route to reducing nanowire transistor on-resistance but has limits. High doping level gives significant loss in gate performance and ultimately complete gate failure. We show that electrolyte gating remains effective even when the doping is so high that traditional metal-oxide gates fail. In this regime we obtain performance surpassing the best existing p-type nanowire MOSFETs. In particular, our sub-threshold swing of 75 mV/dec is within 25% of the room-temperature thermal limit and competitive with n-InP and n-GaAs nanowire MOSFETs. Our results open a new path to extending the performance and application of nanowire transistors, and motivate further work on improved solid electrolytes for nanoscale device applications.