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CARBON-BASED ELECTRONICS

Better radio-frequency transistors with nanotubes

Nature Electronics volume 2, pages 495–496 (2019)Cite this article

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Arrays of carbon nanotubes can be used to build radio-frequency transistors with a higher operating frequency and better linearity than silicon technology.

Radio-frequency (RF) transistors are used to amplify and switch high-frequency electronic signals and are a key component in wireless communication systems. They have historically been dominated by III–V semiconductor technologies: primarily InP and GaAs high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). However, the market for silicon metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) has increased drastically since around 2000, when improved performance due to decades of device scaling finally qualified them as useful RF switches and amplifiers. Compared with III–V transistors, silicon RF MOSFETs offer higher levels of integration with logic circuits at drastically reduced cost1. They have made wireless-communication devices economically accessible even in the developing world and thus have had a profound effect on our economy and society. However, the silicon transistors have intrinsic limitations in terms of speed and linearity. As a result, they are increasingly inadequate as operating bands migrate to millimetre-wave frequencies for next-generation high-bandwidth applications such as 5G, 60 GHz Wi-Fi and WirelessHD2. Writing in Nature Electronics, Christopher Rutherglen and colleagues now show that carbon nanotube arrays can be used to build RF transistors with higher operating frequency and better linearity than silicon technology, and with a process that is scalable to wafer-scale manufacturing3.

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Fig. 1: Nanotube RF transistors.

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Qing Cao

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  1. Qing Cao
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Correspondence to Qing Cao.

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Cao, Q. Better radio-frequency transistors with nanotubes. Nat Electron 2, 495–496 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-019-0327-x

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