Low-voltage high-performance flexible digital and analog circuits based on ultrahigh-purity semiconducting carbon nanotubes

T Lei, LL Shao, YQ Zheng, G Pitner, G Fang… - Nature …, 2019 - nature.com
Nature communications, 2019nature.com
Carbon nanotube (CNT) thin-film transistor (TFT) is a promising candidate for flexible and
wearable electronics. However, it usually suffers from low semiconducting tube purity, low
device yield, and the mismatch between p-and n-type TFTs. Here, we report low-voltage and
high-performance digital and analog CNT TFT circuits based on high-yield (19.9%) and
ultrahigh purity (99.997%) polymer-sorted semiconducting CNTs. Using high-uniformity
deposition and pseudo-CMOS design, we demonstrated CNT TFTs with good uniformity and …
Abstract
Carbon nanotube (CNT) thin-film transistor (TFT) is a promising candidate for flexible and wearable electronics. However, it usually suffers from low semiconducting tube purity, low device yield, and the mismatch between p- and n-type TFTs. Here, we report low-voltage and high-performance digital and analog CNT TFT circuits based on high-yield (19.9%) and ultrahigh purity (99.997%) polymer-sorted semiconducting CNTs. Using high-uniformity deposition and pseudo-CMOS design, we demonstrated CNT TFTs with good uniformity and high performance at low operation voltage of 3 V. We tested forty-four 2-µm channel 5-stage ring oscillators on the same flexible substrate (1,056 TFTs). All worked as expected with gate delays of 42.7 ± 13.1 ns. With these high-performance TFTs, we demonstrated 8-stage shift registers running at 50 kHz and the first tunable-gain amplifier with 1,000 gain at 20 kHz. These results show great potentials of using solution-processed CNT TFTs for large-scale flexible electronics.
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