Low-voltage high-performance flexible digital and analog circuits based on ultrahigh-purity semiconducting carbon nanotubes.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31089127.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-10145-9 and PMC identifier 6517392.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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.