High Performance Semiconducting Enriched Carbon Nanotube Thin Film Transistors Using Metallic Carbon Nanotube Electrode

Abstract: High-performance solution-processed short-channel carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film transistors (TFTs) are fabricated using densely aligned arrays of metallic CNTs (m-CNTs) as source and drain electrodes, and aligned arrays of semiconducting enriched CNTs (s-CNTs) as channel material. The electrical transport measurements at room temperature show that the m-CNT contacted s-CNT array devices with a 2 um channel length perform superiorly to those of control Pd contacted s-CNT devices. The m-CNT contacted devices exhibit a maximum (average) on-conductance of 36.5 uS (19.2 uS), transconductance of 2.6 uS (1.2 uS), mobility of 51 cm2/Vs (25 cm2/Vs), and current on-off ratio of 1.1x10E6 (2.5x10E5). These values are almost an order of magnitude higher than that of control Pd contacted devices with the same channel length and s-CNT linear density. The low temperature charge transport measurements suggest that these improved performances are due to the lower charge injection barrier of m-CNT/s-CNT array devices compared to Pd/s-CNT array devices. We attribute the lower injection barrier to unique geometry of our devices. In addition to using semiconducting enriched CNT, our results suggest that using metallic CNT as an electrode can significantly enhance the performance of CNT TFTs.