Printed carbon nanotube devices and their applications

Printed electronics represents a paradigm shift in electronics manufacturing after 50 years of development in silicon microelectronics. Manufacturing of electronic devices by printing can significantly reduce the equipment investment which is nowadays astronomical in the latest generation of very large scale integrated circuits manufacturing. Printing is an additive process where electronic materials are printed layer by layer to form the final device structure, which is independent of the properties of substrate materials. Such a feature enables electronic devices to be made on flexible substrate, such as plastic or paper, and of much larger size than a silicon wafer. In this paper, development in formulation of single-wall carbon nanotubes ink and printing of field effect transistors are reported. A simple and scalable method to print high performance thin-film transistors (TFTs) with high yield by an aerosol jet printer has been developed, using water-based and chemically functionalized single-wall carbon nanotube inks as the semiconducting layer.