Fabrication of Selective Metal Contacts on Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes for Device Applications

Abstract

Silicon based devices are expected to achieve the limit of possible downscaling in 10 to 15 years. Thus, the search of new materials to construct smaller, faster and more energy efficient devices has been a very active research area. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are very good candidates to construct nanoelectronic and nanophotonic devices [1,2,3] due to unique physical properties, such as its metallic or semiconducting characteristics depending only its diameter and chirality [4,5] and capability of caring high current densities (up to 1010A/cm2). In this work we develop nanofabrication techniques of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) based devices using a combination of electron beam and optical lithography with Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). We used both CVD-grown nanotubes [6] and HipCO-NTs [7] suspended on aqueous solution and deposited on the substrate. Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) in tapping mode (Multimode Nanoscope IV, Digital Instruments) was used to CVD sample characterization, study of CNT deposition and to localize and index the nanotubes on substrate using lithography patterns as references, making possible to selectively construct metallic contacts on the CNTs.