The growth of modern societies is strongly linked to the development of new electronic devices and circuits. Among them, the one that has played the most important role promoting humanity progress is the Field Effect Transistor (FET), which is the basic unit of most electronic circuits and computers. In its humble origins the performance of electronic transistors was very limited, but during the 20^th century the scientific community has made them smaller, faster, cheaper and energetically more efficient. Now, the size of FETs is approaching a physical limit, as they are reaching the atomic scale, and this has accelerated the race for finding novel strategies that allow continuing the scaling trend that has prevailed during the last four decades. In this direction, a rising star for device fabrication are two dimensional (2D) materials. Due to their superior properties, these materials can provide very high performance in terms of switching speed, power consumption and durability compared to traditional silicon-based FETs. Moreover, these materials provide additional properties such as flexibility and transparency, opening a new horizon for the development of electronic devices.

The first 2D material ever synthesized, which is also the most popular one, is graphene. During the last years a countless amount of electronic devices using graphene have been reported, but now the interest in graphene electronics seems to be losing its momentum. The reason is that, after many studies, academia and industry have realized that graphene presents an essential limitation: it has no bandgap, and it cannot be artificially induced without degrading graphene’s genuine properties. That means graphene cannot be efficiently used in logic applications because the power consumption prohibitively increases; and that is a major problem because 90% of electronic devices we daily use require such logic circuits. Fortunately, recent discoveries have allowed the fabrication of semiconductor 2D materials, and among them the family of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (2D/TMD) shows very promising performance. Therefore, the study of 2D/TMD FETs is going to be a key element in micro/nano electronics research for the next years.

Although some seminal research papers have already demonstrated outstanding properties, the research in the field of 2D/TMDs FETs is still in its embryonic stage, and there are still many open questions that need to be addressed, with a most important one concerning their basically unknown reliability. Therefore, the aim of this project is the study of key reliability issues involved in next generation FETs made of advanced 2D/TMDs. With the help of expert partners, we will contribute to the establishment of 2D materials in the semiconductors industry, providing a realistic solution to avoid the stagnation of the scaling down of FETs, and contribute to the technology-driven development of our society.