10 to 50 nm Long Quasi Ballistic Carbon Nanotube Devices Obtained Without Complex Lithography

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple fabrication method for ultra-short single-walled carbon nanotube devices, achieving near-ballistic transport and high current capacity without complex lithography, advancing nanoscale electronics.

Contribution

A straightforward approach combining photolithography and shadow evaporation to produce sub-50 nm SWCNT devices without complex tools, enabling high-performance nanoelectronic components.

Findings

SWCNT devices with 10-50 nm lengths are fabricated efficiently.

Near-ballistic transport observed in ~10 nm metallic SWCNTs.

Semiconducting SWCNT FETs with ~50 nm channels show high performance.

Abstract

A simple method combining photolithography and shadow (or angle) evaporation is developed to fabricate single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) devices with tube lengths L~10-50 nm between metal contacts. Large numbers of such short devices are obtained without the need of complex tools such as electron beam lithography. Metallic SWCNTs with lengths ~ 10 nm, near the mean free path (mfp) of lop~15 nm for optical phonon scattering, exhibit near-ballistic transport at high biases and can carry unprecedented 100 mA currents per tube. Semiconducting SWCNT field-effect transistors (FETs) with ~ 50 nm channel lengths are routinely produced to achieve quasi-ballistic operations for molecular transistors. The results demonstrate highly length-scaled and high-performance interconnects and transistors realized with SWCNTs.