Theory and practice of "striping" for improved ON/OFF Ratio in carbon nanonet thin film transistors

Abstract

A new technique to reduce the influence of metallic carbon nanotubes (CNTs)-relevant for large-scale integrated circuits based on CNT-nanonet transistors-is proposed and verified. Historically, electrical and chemical filtering of the metallic CNTs have been used to improve the ON/OFF ratio of CNT-nanonet transistors; however, the corresponding degradation in ON-current has made these techniques somewhat unsatisfactory. Here, we abandon the classical approaches in favor of a new approach based on relocation of asymmetric percolation threshold of CNT-nanonet transistors by a technique called "striping"; this allows fabrication of transistors with ON/OFF ratio >1000 and ON-current degradation no more than a factor of 2. We offer first principle numerical models, experimental confirmation, and renormalization arguments to provide a broad theoretical and experimental foundation of the proposed method. © 2009 Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag.