Review—Silicene: From Material to Device Applications

During the last decade, there has been considerable interest of researchers towards the use of two-dimensional (2D) materials for the electronic device implementations. The main driving force is the improved performance offered by these 2D materials for electronic device operation in nano-scale regime. Among these 2D material, silicene (the 2D of silicon) has emerged as preferred choice because of its expected integration with silicon based technology. This expected integration of silicene with silicon technology is one of the primary advantages of silicene as a material for future electronic devices with the availability of infrastructure of bulk silicon for its processing. Silicene in its basic form is a conductor due to the zero bandgap formation and therefore several techniques have been given in the open literature for forming the band gap in silicene. Besides, silicene has been used to design several electronic devices ranging from transistors to photodetectors. In this paper, a review of silicene is presented considering a) the features/properties offered by it, b) the methods employed for the generation of its bandgap, c) different types of field effect transistors (FETs) reported on silicene, and d) spintronic applications of silicene.