Charge-Injection-Induced Time Decay in Carbon Nanotube Network-Based FETs

A voltage-pulse method is utilized to investigate the charge-injection-induced time decay of the source-drain current of field-effect transistors with randomly networked single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the conduction channel. The relaxation of trapped carriers in the CNT networks can be accounted for by assuming two exponential decays occurring simultaneously. The slow decay is characterized by a time constant comparable to literature data obtained for a carrier recombination in the semiconducting CNTs. The faster decay with a time constant that has a smaller order of magnitude is attributed to the annihilation of trapped carriers in metallic CNTs or at metal-CNT contacts. Both time constants are gate-bias dependent.