The channel length effect on the electrical performance of suspended-single-wall-carbon-nanotube-based field effect transistors

We report on the electrical performance of field effect transistor (FET) nanodevices based on suspended single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) grown by our all-laser synthesis process. The attractiveness of the proposed approach lies in the combination of standard microfabrication processing with the in situ all-laser localized growth of SWCNTs, offering an affordable way of directly integrating SWCNTs into nanodevices. The all-laser process uses the same KrF excimer laser (248 nm), first, to deposit the nanocatalyzed electrodes and, in a second step, to grow the SWCNTs in a suspended geometry, achieving thereby the lateral bridging of the electrodes. The nanocatalyzed electrodes consist of a multilayer stack sandwiching a catalyst nanolayer (~5 nm thick) composed of Co/Ni nanoparticles. The all-laser grown SWCNTs (~1 nm diameter) are most often seen to self-assemble into bundles (10–20 nm diameter) and to bridge laterally the various gap lengths (in the 2–10 µm investigation range) separating adjacent electrodes. The suspended-SWCNT-based FETs were found to behave as p-type transistors, in air and at room temperature, with very high ON/OFF switching ratios (whose magnitude markedly increases as the active channel length is reduced). For the shortest gap (i.e. 2 µm), the suspended-SWCNT-based FETs exhibited not only an ON/OFF switching ratio in excess of seven orders of magnitude, but also an ON-state conductance as high as 3.26 µS. Their corresponding effective carrier mobility was estimated (at VSD = 100 mV) to a value of ~4000 cm2 V−1 s−1, which is almost ten times higher than the hole mobility in single-crystal silicon at room temperature.