Cockrell School of Engineering professor Ananth Dodabalapur, of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, together with researchers at Northwestern University have demonstrated a new method to improve the reliability and performance of transistors and circuits based on carbon nanotubes (CNT), a semiconductor material that has long been considered by scientists as one of the most promising successors to silicon for smaller, faster and cheaper electronic devices. The result appears in a new paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.
In the paper, researchers examined the effect of a fluoropolymer coating called PVDF-TrFE on single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) transistors and ring oscillator circuits, and demonstrated that these coatings can substantially improve the performance of single-walled carbon nanotube devices. PVDF-TrFE is also known by its long chemical name polyvinyledenedifluoride-tetrafluoroethylene.
“We attribute the improvements to the polar nature of PVDF-TrFE that mitigates the negative effect of impurities and defects on the performance of semiconductor single-walled carbon nanotubes,” said Dodabalapur, who led the research. “The use of [PVDF-TrFE] capping layers will be greatly beneficial to the adoption of single-walled carbon nanotube circuits in printed electronics and flexible display applications.”
Read more on the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering website »
