Marina Y. Zavodchikova

Carbon nanotube thin film transistors based on aerosol methods

We demonstrate a fabrication method for high-performance field-effect transistors (FETs) based on dry-processed random single-walled carbon nanotube networks (CNTNs) deposited at room temperature. This method is an advantageous alternative to solution-processed and direct CVD grown CNTN FETs, which allows using various substrate materials, including heat-intolerant plastic substrates, and enables an efficient, density-controlled, scalable deposition of as-produced single-walled CNTNs on the substrate directly from the aerosol (floating catalyst) synthesis reactor. Two types of thin film transistor (TFT) structures were fabricated to evaluate the FET performance of dry-processed CNTNs: bottom-gate transistors on Si/SiO2 substrates and top-gate transistors on polymer substrates. Devices exhibited on/off ratios up to 10(5) and field-effect mobilities up to 4 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1). The suppression of hysteresis in the bottom-gate device transfer characteristics by means of thermal treatment in vacuum and passivation by an atomic layer deposited Al(2)O(3) film was investigated. A 32 nm thick Al(2)O(3) layer was found to be able to eliminate the hysteresis.

High-yield of memory elements from carbon nanotube field-effect transistors with atomic layer deposited gate dielectric

Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNT FETs) have been proposed as possible building blocks for future nano-electronics. But a challenge with CNT FETs is that they appear to randomly display varying amounts of hysteresis in their transfer characteristics. The hysteresis is often attributed to charge trapping in the dielectric layer between the nanotube and the gate. We find that the memory effect can be controlled by carefully designing the gate dielectric in nm-thin layers. By using atomic layer depositions (ALD) of HfO2 and TiO2 in a triple-layer configuration, we achieve to our knowledge the first CNT FETs with consistent and narrowly distributed memory effects in their transfer characteristics. The study includes 94 CNT FET samples, providing a good basis for statistics on the hysteresis seen in five different CNT-gate configurations.