Carbon Nanotube Transistors Finally Outperform Silicon

Photo: Stephanie Precourt/UW-Madison College of Engineering

Back in the 1990s, observers predicted that the single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) would be the nanomaterial that pushed silicon aside and created a post-CMOS world where Moore’s Law could continue its march towards ever=smaller chip dimensions. All of that hope was swallowed up by inconsistencies between semiconducting and metallic SWCNTs and the vexing issue of trying to get them all to align on a wafer.

The introduction of graphene seemed to take the final bit of luster off of carbon nanotubes’ shine, but the material, which researchers have been using to make transistors for over 20 years, has experienced a renaissance of late.

Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) have given SWCNTs a new boost in their resurgence by using them to make a transistor that outperforms state-of-the-art silicon transistors.

“This achievement has been a dream of nanotechnology for the last 20 years,” said Michael Arnold, a professor at UW-Madison, in a press release. “Making carbon nanotube transistors that are better than silicon transistors is a big milestone,” Arnold added. “[It’s] a critical advance toward exploiting carbon nanotubes in logic, high-speed communications, and other semiconductor electronics technologies.”

In research described in the journal Science Advances, the UW-Madison researchers were able to achieve a current that is 1.9 times as fast as that seen in silicon transistors. The measure of how rapidly the current that can travel through the channel between a transistor’s source and drain determines how fast the circuit is. The more current there is, the more quickly the gate of the next device in the circuit can be charged .

The key to getting the nanotubes to create such a fast transistor was a new process that employs polymers to sort between the metallic and semiconducting SWCNTs to create an ultra-high purity of solution.

“We’ve identified specific conditions in which you can get rid of nearly all metallic nanotubes, [leaving] less than 0.01 percent metallic nanotubes [in a sample],” said Arnold.

The researchers had already tackled the problem of aligning and placing the nanotubes on a wafer two years ago when they developed a process they dubbed “floating evaporative self-assembly.” That technique uses a hydrophobic substrate and partially submerges it in water. Then the SWCNTs are deposited on its surface and the substrate removed vertically from the water.

“In our research, we’ve shown that we can simultaneously overcome all of these challenges of working with nanotubes, and that has allowed us to create these groundbreaking carbon nanotube transistors that surpass silicon and gallium arsenide transistors,” said Arnold.

In the video below, Arnold provides a little primer on SWCNTs and what his group’s research with them could mean to the future of electronics.

In continuing research, the UW-Madison team will be aiming to replicate the manufacturability of silicon transistors. To date, they have managed to scale their alignment and deposition process to 1-inch-by-1-inch wafers; the longer-term goal is to bring this up to commercial scales.

Arnold added: “There has been a lot of hype about carbon nanotubes that hasn’t been realized, and that has kind of soured many people’s outlook. But we think the hype is deserved. It has just taken decades of work for the materials science to catch up and allow us to effectively harness these materials.”

ORIGINAL: IEEE

By Dexter Johnson

6 Sep 2016