Among the candidate channel materials for the next generation electronic devices, semiconducting carbon nanotube (CNT) is unique in that it has no dangling bonds but has perfect Ohmic contacts to both the conduction and valence bands of the CNT. This is extremely important, since it provides the required chemical and mechanical stability of the devices, and renders both n-type and p-type FETs with performance close to ballistic limit available for CNT CMOS. CNT also has high carrier mobility and high saturation velocities, allowing high performance in long channel device where the transport is dominated by diffusive transport, and in short channel device where the device speed is determined by the saturation or Fermi velocity. In addition, a semiconducting CNT has a symmetric band structure near the Fermi level that gives identical effective mass for both electron and hole, leading to symmetric CMOS with potentially very low power consumption and compacted circuit layout. The atomic thickness of the CNT conduction channel is also extremely important in that it allows easier control of the channel current, making the scaling of the CNT technology possible down to 5nm transistor technology.
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