High-Performance\nComplementary Transistors and Medium-Scale\nIntegrated Circuits Based on Carbon Nanotube Thin Films

Abstract

Solution-derived\ncarbon nanotube (CNT) network films with high\nsemiconducting purity are suitable materials for the wafer-scale fabrication\nof field-effect transistors (FETs) and integrated circuits (ICs).\nHowever, it is challenging to realize high-performance complementary\nmetal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) FETs with high yield and stability\non such CNT network films, and this difficulty hinders the development\nof CNT-film-based ICs. In this work, we developed a doping-free process\nfor the fabrication of CMOS FETs based on solution-processed CNT network\nfilms, in which the polarity of the FETs was controlled using Sc or\nPd as the source/drain contacts to selectively inject carriers into\nthe channels. The fabricated top-gated CMOS FETs showed high symmetry\nbetween the characteristics of n- and p-type devices and exhibited\nhigh-performance uniformity and excellent scalability down to a gate\nlength of 1 μm. Many common types of CMOS ICs, including typical\nlogic gates, sequential circuits, and arithmetic units, were constructed\nbased on CNT films, and the fabricated ICs exhibited rail-to-rail\noutputs because of the high noise margin of CMOS circuits. In particular,\n4-bit full adders consisting of 132 CMOS FETs were realized with 100%\nyield, thereby demonstrating that this CMOS technology shows the potential\nto advance the development of medium-scale CNT-network-film-based\nICs.