Author : Sean Michael Foradori
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (143 download)
Book Synopsis Carbon Nanotube Arrays - by : Sean Michael Foradori
Download or read book Carbon Nanotube Arrays - written by Sean Michael Foradori and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semiconducting, single walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are exceptional electronic materials with high current carrying capacity, a tunable band gap, and nanoscale dimensions. Single CNTs in research devices have demonstrated these excellent material properties. Extrapolation of these single CNT results to devices with many CNTs in tightly packed and highly aligned arrays indicates that CNTs can exceed the performance of existing silicon based devices in many applications by operating at lower voltages and using less energy. The performance of array based devices has not yet met these high expectations, however, due in part to practical challenges in fabricating arrays and integrating those arrays into devices. Aligned arrays can be deposited using many different processes to generate a wide range of CNT packing densities and array morphologies. The morphology and packing density both can affect device performance. Polymer wrapped CNTs with high semiconductor purity are often used in these arrays, but the polymer wrapper must be removed from the CNT array to achieve the best device performance. Chapter 2 examines the impact of CNT bundles on the performance of field effect transistors (FETs) with relatively weak gates. These bundles, colinear aggregates containing multiple CNTs, are formed during some array fabrication processes and can behave differently from individual CNTs. When using relatively weak gates, bundles have a current density similar to individual CNTs, but they have different threshold voltages than individual CNTs, meaning their conductivity turns on and off at different gate voltages. Arrays with a mixture of individual and bundled CNTs make devices with poor subthreshold swing because the gate cannot turn the whole array off at any particular voltage; the array turns off gradually as the gate voltage changes. Chapter 3 examines bundles in FETs with strong ion gel gates. A strong gate can turn on multiple CNTs in a bundle, increasing their current density relative to individual CNTs. An FET with a strong gate and a CNT array containing many bundles will have a higher transconductance than a device with an array containing only individual CNTs. This can be useful in radio frequency transistors because their high frequency performance improves as transconductance increases, but is degraded by parasitic capacitance effects if the channel width is increased. By using an array of bundled CNTs instead of an array of individual CNTs, the transconductance can be increased without increasing the channel width. Chapter 4 describes a strategy to fabricate monolayer arrays with high packing density and very little bundling. Passing a substrate through a macroscopic liquid-liquid interface can deposit aligned arrays of CNTs at the liquid-liquid-substrate contact line. The new strategy uses lithographically defined, microscopic water droplets on substrates to form a contact line that is more stable and improves the array deposition. The advantage of patterned microscopic droplets is that the contact line is pinned by the hydrophilic/hydrophobic border of the chemical pattern, and is decoupled from the motions of the substrate and macroscopic liquid-liquid interface. This relatively stable contact line moves as each CNT is deposited, allowing subsequent CNTs to deposit adjacent to the previously deposited ones, improving the alignment and increasing the packing density to 250 CNTs ℗æm-1 with very little bundling. Devices made using these arrays have exceptionally high current density and transconductance of 1.9 mA ℗æm-1 and 1.2 mS ℗æm-1 at a channel length of 60 nm using just a 0.6 V drain voltage. This is a >2x performance improvement over arrays formed with similar conditions but deposited at the contact line of the macroscopic interface. Finally, Chapter 5 investigates a yttrium (Y) based post-deposition process used to mitigate the effects of wrapping polymer in CNT FETs. Though this process has been used for several years, very little information has been reported about how it works. We use physical and spectroscopic measurements to examine the mechanism, selectivity, extent of etching, and range of conditions available for removing the wrapping polymer PFO-BPy from CNTs. The Y-treatment process consists of depositing 3 nm of metallic Y on the sample, annealing in air at a fixed temperature and time, then etching the sample in dilute HCl for 5 seconds, and rinsing in DI water. Annealing at 90°C or cooler for 30 minutes will oxidize ~0.5 nm of a PFO-BPy film, forming highly oxidized carbonate, carboxylate and/or carbonyl groups, allowing it to dissolve in dilute aqueous acid. Repeated Y-treatment cycles will etch more material, and thicker layers of up to 2.5 nm can be etched by annealing at 250°C for 120 minutes. Reactions with sp2 based CNTs and graphene only occur at elevated temperatures, allowing selective removal of wrapping polymer from CNTs at lower temperatures. Furthermore, the yttrium process can remove all parts of the PFO-BPy polymer molecule, in contrast to high-temperature vacuum annealing which only removes alkyl side groups and leaves much of the polymer chain intact.
