Aligned arrays of single walled carbon nanotubes for transparent electronics

Single walled carbon nanotubes have garnered substantial interest in the electronic materials research community due to their unparalleled intrinsic electrical properties. In addition, their mechanical robustness and thin geometries make SWNTs ideal candidates for transparent electronics. Aligned arrays of SWNTs grown via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on quartz enable device uniformity and wafer scale integration with existing commercial semiconductor processing methods. A crucial roadblock in incorporation of SWNTs in commercial electronics has been the co-existence of metallic and semiconducting SWNTs. Demanding device metrics in high performance and complex integrated electrical devices, sensors, and other applications dictate the necessity of pristine, purely semiconducting arrays of SWNTs. By exploiting a novel process in nanoscale flow of thin film organic coatings, we have demonstrated a method to purify as-grown aligned arrays to produce such as result. Comparison with single nanotube statistics, characterization using a novel thermal scanning probe microscopy technique, as well as corroboration with thermal modeling validated the result. Thin film field effect transistors exhibiting mobilities exceeding ∼1000cm²/Vs and on/off ratios exceeding 10,000 were fabricated using the purified semiconducting SWNTs. This manuscript reviews some of these results, which represent the first successful demonstration of purification of aligned arrays of SWNTs, in a robust and scalable scheme that allows integration of aligned arrays into complex, high performance electrical devices. We separately also describe new results on the advanced development of soft lithography techniques with the ability to transfer print aligned arrays of SWNTs onto transparent substrates after synthesis and processing, thereby completing a direct pathway to achieve complex, high performance, and highly integrated transparent SWNTs electronics, sensors, or other devices.