Carbon nanotube-based flexible high-speed circuits with sub-nanosecond stage delays

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 6734 - 8
• Main Authors: Long, Guanhua, Jin, Wanlin, Xia, Fan, Wang, Yuru, Bai, Tianshun, Chen, Xingxing, Liang, Xuelei, Peng, Lian-Mao, Hu, Youfan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 08.11.2022; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 142/126; 639/301/357/73; 639/925/927/1007; Carbon; Carbon nanotubes; Circuits; Contact resistance; Data analysis; High speed; Humanities and Social Sciences; Information management; multidisciplinary; Oscillators; Performance enhancement; Real time; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Semiconductor devices; Substrates; Thin film transistors; Thin films; Transconductance; Transistors; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34621-x

High-speed flexible circuits are required in flexible systems to realize real-time information analysis or to construct wireless communication modules for emerging applications. Here, we present scaled carbon nanotube-based thin film transistors (CNT-TFTs) with channel lengths down to 450 nm on 2-μm-thick parylene substrates, achieving state-of-the-art performances of high on-state current (187.6 μA μm −1 ) and large transconductance (123.3 μS μm −1 ). Scaling behavior analyses reveal that the enhanced performance introduced by scaling is attributed to channel resistance reduction while the contact resistance (180 ± 50 kΩ per tube) remains unchanged, which is comparable to that achieved in devices on rigid substrates, indicating great potential in ultimate scaled flexible CNT-TFTs with high performance comparable to their counterparts on rigid substrates where contact resistance dominates the performance. Five-stage flexible ring oscillators are built to benchmark the speed of scaled devices, demonstrating a 281 ps stage delay at a low supply voltage of 2.6 V. High-speed flexible circuits are essential in flexible systems for real-time information analysis and wireless communication. Here, flexible circuits are reported with a 281 ps stage delay based on scaled carbon nanotube thin film transistors.