Complementary Transistors Based on Aligned Semiconducting Carbon Nanotube Arrays

Chenchen Liu; Yu Cao; Bo Wang; Zixuan Zhang; Yanxia Lin; Lin Xu; Yingjun Yang; Chuanhong Jin; Lian-Mao Peng; Zhiyong Zhang

doi:10.1021/acsnano.2c10007

Complementary Transistors Based on Aligned Semiconducting Carbon Nanotube Arrays

ACS Nano. 2022 Dec 27;16(12):21482-21490. doi: 10.1021/acsnano.2c10007. Epub 2022 Nov 23.

Authors

Chenchen Liu^{1

2}, Yu Cao¹, Bo Wang³, Zixuan Zhang³, Yanxia Lin^{1

4}, Lin Xu¹, Yingjun Yang^{1

5}, Chuanhong Jin^{3

2}, Lian-Mao Peng^{1

4

5

2}, Zhiyong Zhang^{1

4

5

2}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Center for Carbon-based Electronics, School of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
² Jihua Laboratory, Foshan, Guangdong 528200, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
⁴ Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
⁵ Beijing Institute of Carbon-based Integrated Circuits, Beijing 100195, China.

PMID: 36416375
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.2c10007

Abstract

High-density semiconducting aligned carbon nanotube (A-CNT) arrays have been demonstrated with wafer-scale preparation of materials and have shown high performance in P-type field-effect transistors (FETs) and great potential for applications in future digital integrated circuits (ICs). However, high-performance N-type FETs (N-FETs) have not yet been implemented with A-CNTs, making development of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, a necessary component for modern digital ICs, impossible. In this work, we reveal the mechanism hindering the realization of A-CNT N-FETs contacted by low-work-function metals and develop corresponding solutions to promote the performance of N-FETs to that of P-type FETs (P-FETs). The fabricated scandium (Sc)-contacted A-CNT N-FET with a 100 nm gate length exhibits an on-state current (I_on) of 800 μA/μm and a peak transconductance (g_m) of 250 μS/μm, representing the highest performance of CNT-based N-FETs to date. Moreover, CMOS technology has been developed to realize N- and P-FETs with symmetric high performance based on A-CNTs. The fabricated A-CNT CMOS FETs show electron and hole mobilities of 325 and 241 cm² V^-1 s^-1, respectively, which are slightly higher than the corresponding values of Si CMOS transistors. Our scalable fabrication of A-CNT CMOS FETs with comparable electronic performance to Si CMOS will promote the application of CNT-based electronics in digital ICs.

Keywords: CMOS inverters; N-type field effect transistors; aligned carbon nanotubes; density optimization; doping-free CMOS technology; hydrophobic substrate treatment.