A quick overview of carbon nanotubes and graphene applications for future electronics

Although carbon nanotube electronics has been actively developed during the past 2 decades, practical applications are still very limited because transistor fabrication is plagued by a number of problems, such as separation of semiconductor specimens from the metallic ones, alignment and organization with high densities, contact reproducibility for transistors, etc. In this context, the field of carbon nanotubes is progressively evolving towards flexible electronics applications which are much less demanding than advanced integrated circuits (ICs) in terms of device characteristics and integration density. On the other hand, graphene which has been isolated only 7 years ago seems to be more promising, in particular for ICs, as well as for large area transparent conducting film applications. In this paper, we briefly review some basic properties of these two emblematic nanomaterials and present some recent advances concerning their use. In particular, we show how the two fields are entangled, i.e., how graphene can improve some of the properties of carbon nanotube devices, and how carbon nanotubes can be employed as precursors for the fabrication of graphene nanoribbons. Future carbon-based devices and circuits will probably make extensive use of combinations of these two exceptional materials.