Soft-lock drawing of super-aligned carbon nanotube bundles for nanometre electrical contacts

Yunfan Guo; Enzheng Shi; Jiadi Zhu; Pin-Chun Shen; Jiangtao Wang; Yuxuan Lin; Yunwei Mao; Shibin Deng; Baini Li; Ji-Hoon Park; Ang-Yu Lu; Shuchen Zhang; Qingqing Ji; Zhe Li; Chenguang Qiu; Song Qiu; Qingwen Li; Letian Dou; Yue Wu; Jin Zhang; Tomás Palacios; Anyuan Cao; Jing Kong

doi:10.1038/s41565-021-01034-8

Soft-lock drawing of super-aligned carbon nanotube bundles for nanometre electrical contacts

Nat Nanotechnol. 2022 Mar;17(3):278-284. doi: 10.1038/s41565-021-01034-8. Epub 2022 Jan 20.

Authors

Yunfan Guo^#^{1

2}, Enzheng Shi^#^{3

4

5}, Jiadi Zhu^#¹, Pin-Chun Shen^{1

6}, Jiangtao Wang¹, Yuxuan Lin¹, Yunwei Mao⁷, Shibin Deng⁸, Baini Li⁹, Ji-Hoon Park¹, Ang-Yu Lu¹, Shuchen Zhang¹⁰, Qingqing Ji¹, Zhe Li¹¹, Chenguang Qiu¹², Song Qiu¹³, Qingwen Li¹³, Letian Dou¹⁴, Yue Wu¹¹, Jin Zhang¹⁰, Tomás Palacios¹⁵, Anyuan Cao¹⁶, Jing Kong¹⁷

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
² Research Institute of Frontier Technology, College of Micro-Nano Electronics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
³ Key Laboratory of 3D Micro/Nano Fabrication and Characterization of Zhejiang Province, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China. shienzheng@westlake.edu.cn.
⁴ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China. shienzheng@westlake.edu.cn.
⁵ Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. shienzheng@westlake.edu.cn.
⁶ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Hsinchu, Taiwan.
⁷ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁸ Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
⁹ Key Laboratory of 3D Micro/Nano Fabrication and Characterization of Zhejiang Province, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China.
¹⁰ College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China.
¹¹ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.
¹² Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing, China.
¹³ Division of Advanced Nano-Materials, Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, China.
¹⁴ Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
¹⁵ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. tpalacios@mit.edu.
¹⁶ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China. anyuan@pku.edu.cn.
¹⁷ Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. jingkong@mit.edu.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 35058655
DOI: 10.1038/s41565-021-01034-8

Abstract

The assembly of single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into high-density horizontal arrays is strongly desired for practical applications, but challenges remain despite myriads of research efforts. Herein, we developed a non-destructive soft-lock drawing method to achieve ultraclean single-walled CNT arrays with a very high degree of alignment (angle standard deviation of ~0.03°). These arrays contained a large portion of nanometre-sized CNT bundles, yielding a high packing density (~400 µm^-1) and high current carrying capacity (∼1.8 × 10⁸ A cm^-²). This alignment strategy can be generally extended to diverse substrates or sources of raw single-walled CNTs. Significantly, the assembled CNT bundles were used as nanometre electrical contacts of high-density monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) transistors, exhibiting high current density (~38 µA µm^-1), low contact resistance (~1.6 kΩ µm), excellent device-to-device uniformity and highly reduced device areas (0.06 µm² per device), demonstrating their potential for future electronic devices and advanced integration technologies.

Abstract

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