  The primary mechanism of operation of almost all transistors today relies on
electric-field effect in a semiconducting channel to tune its conductivity from
the conducting 'on'-state to a non-conducting 'off'-state. As transistors
continue to scale down to increase computational performance, physical
limitations from nanoscale field-effect operation begin to cause undesirable
current leakage that is detrimental to the continued advancement of computing.
Using a fundamentally different mechanism of operation, we show that through
nanoscale strain engineering with thin films and ferroelectrics (FEs) the
transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) MoTe$_2$ can be reversibly switched with
electric-field induced strain between the 1T'-MoTe$_2$ (semimetallic) phase to
a semiconducting MoTe$_2$ phase in a field effect transistor geometry. This
alternative mechanism for transistor switching sidesteps all the static and
dynamic power consumption problems in conventional field-effect transistors
(FETs). Using strain, we achieve large non-volatile changes in channel
conductivity (G$_{on}$/G$_{off}$~10$^7$ vs. G$_{on}$/G$_{off}$~0.04 in the
control device) at room temperature. Ferroelectric devices offer the potential
to reach sub-ns nonvolatile strain switching at the attojoule/bit level, having
immediate applications in ultra-fast low-power non-volatile logic and memory
while also transforming the landscape of computational architectures since
conventional power, speed, and volatility considerations for microelectronics
may no longer exist.
