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Soft-lock drawing of super-aligned carbon nanotube bundles for nanometre electrical contacts

Nature Nanotechnology volume 17, pages 278–284 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The assembly of single-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into high-density horizontal arrays is strongly desired for practical applications, but challenges remain despite myriads of research efforts. Herein, we developed a non-destructive soft-lock drawing method to achieve ultraclean single-walled CNT arrays with a very high degree of alignment (angle standard deviation of ~0.03°). These arrays contained a large portion of nanometre-sized CNT bundles, yielding a high packing density (~400 µm−1) and high current carrying capacity (∼1.8 × 108 A cm−2). This alignment strategy can be generally extended to diverse substrates or sources of raw single-walled CNTs. Significantly, the assembled CNT bundles were used as nanometre electrical contacts of high-density monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) transistors, exhibiting high current density (~38 µA µm−1), low contact resistance (~1.6 kΩ µm), excellent device-to-device uniformity and highly reduced device areas (0.06 µm2 per device), demonstrating their potential for future electronic devices and advanced integration technologies.

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Fig. 1: Characterizations of aligned CNT arrays created with a soft-lock drawing method.
Fig. 2: Mechanism and statistics of CNT alignment.
Fig. 3: Cleaning and long-range ordering of CNTs by soft-lock drawing method.
Fig. 4: MoS2 transistor array with CNT bundles as nanometre electrical contacts.

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Data availability

All data are available in the manuscript or supplementary information. All materials and data are available on request to J.K., A.C., T.P. and E.S.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F. Yang and Y. Li from Peking University for helpful discussions, and the Instrumentation and Service Center for Physical Sciences (ISCPS) at Westlake University for part of morphological characterizations. This work is partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under the MURI-FATE program, grant no. FA9550-15-1-0514 (Y.G. and J.K.); NSFC 51672005 and Natural Science Foundation of Beijing 2212028 (A.C.), as well as by the US Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, under cooperative agreement no. W911NF-18-2-0048 (T.P., J.-D.Z., Y.L., P.-C.S., A.-Y.L. and J.K.), US Army Research Office under grant no. W911NF-18-1-0431 (J.W., J.-H.P. and J.K.), the STC Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, NSF grant no. DMR-1231319 (Q.J. and J.K.), the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (NSF Grant No. 0939514) (P.-C.S. and J.K.) and the Office of Naval Research, grant no. N00014-19-1-2296 (L.D.).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Yunfan Guo, Enzheng Shi, Jiadi Zhu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yunfan Guo, Jiadi Zhu, Pin-Chun Shen, Jiangtao Wang, Yuxuan Lin, Ji-Hoon Park, Ang-Yu Lu, Qingqing Ji, Tomás Palacios & Jing Kong

  2. Research Institute of Frontier Technology, College of Micro-Nano Electronics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Yunfan Guo

  3. Key Laboratory of 3D Micro/Nano Fabrication and Characterization of Zhejiang Province, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China

    Enzheng Shi & Baini Li

  4. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Enzheng Shi & Anyuan Cao

  5. Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Enzheng Shi & Letian Dou

  6. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Pin-Chun Shen

  7. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Yunwei Mao

  8. Department of Chemistry, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Shibin Deng

  9. College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Shuchen Zhang & Jin Zhang

  10. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Zhe Li & Yue Wu

  11. Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Chenguang Qiu

  12. Division of Advanced Nano-Materials, Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, China

    Song Qiu & Qingwen Li

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  1. Yunfan Guo
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Contributions

Y.G., E.S., J.-D.Z. and J.K. designed the study. Y.G. and E.S. performed material synthesis, characterization and CNT alignment. J.-D.Z. performed device, array fabrication and measurements. P.-C.S. performed the initial device fabrication and measurements. J.W. performed the flexible modelling of CNTs alignment. Y.M. performed the initial mechanism modelling of CNTs alignment. Y.L. performed the CNT ampacity measurement. S.D. conducted the measurement of CNT density. J.-H.P. performed the MOCVD synthesis of MoS2. A.-Y.L. performed the statistics of CNTs diameter from Raman measurements. S.Z. conducted polarization Raman measurements. S.Q. and Q.L. provided CNT materials. B.L., Q.J., Z.L, C.Q., L.D., S.Q. Q.L., Y.W., J.Z., T.P. and A.C. participated in data analysis. E.S., Y.G. and J.-D.Z. wrote the manuscript. All authors read and revised the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Enzheng Shi, Tomás Palacios, Anyuan Cao or Jing Kong.

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Competing interests

E.S., Y.G., B.L. and A.C. have applied for a patent related to the results presented in Figs. 1, 2f and 3a,c–f and Supplementary Figs. 1–6, 14 and 25 with patent application number 2021113134358. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Modelling and calculation, Supplementary Figs. 1–31, Tables 1 and 2, Notes 1 and 2, and refs. 1–18.

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Guo, Y., Shi, E., Zhu, J. et al. Soft-lock drawing of super-aligned carbon nanotube bundles for nanometre electrical contacts. Nat. Nanotechnol. 17, 278–284 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-01034-8

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