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Drain-engineered carbon-nanotube-film field-effect transistors with high performance and ultra-low current leakage

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Abstract

A small bandgap and light carrier effective mass (m0) lead to obvious ambipolar transport behavior in carbon nanotube (CNT) field-effect transistors (FETs), including a high off-state current and severe degradation of the subthreshold swing (SS) with increasing drain bias voltage. We demonstrate a drain-engineered method to cope with this common problem in CNT-film FETs with a sub-µm channel length, i.e., suppressing the ambipolar behavior while maintaining high on-state performance by adopting a feedback gate (FBG) structure to extend the drain region from the CNT/metal contact to the proximate CNT channels to suppress the tunneling current. Sub-400-nm-channel-length FETs with a FBG structure statistically present a high on/off ratio of up to 104 and a sub-200 mV/dec SS under a high drain bias of up to −2 V while maintaining a high on-state current of 0.2 mA/µm or a peak transconductance of 0.2 mS/µm. By lowering the supply voltage to 1.5 V, FBG CNT-film FETs can meet the requirement of standard-performance ultra large scale integrated circuits (ULSICs). Therefore, the introduction of the drain engineering structure enables applications of CNT-film-based FETs in ULSICs and could also be widely extended to other small-bandgap semiconductor-based FETs for an improvement in their off-state property.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (No. 2016YFA0201901), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61888102, 61621061, and 61427901), and the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission (No. D171100006617002 1-2).

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  1. Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Lijun Liu, Chenyi Zhao, Li Ding, Lianmao Peng & Zhiyong Zhang

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  1. Lijun Liu
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  2. Chenyi Zhao
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  3. Li Ding
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  4. Lianmao Peng
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Correspondence to Lianmao Peng or Zhiyong Zhang.

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Liu, L., Zhao, C., Ding, L. et al. Drain-engineered carbon-nanotube-film field-effect transistors with high performance and ultra-low current leakage. Nano Res. 13, 1875–1881 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2558-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2558-6

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