Aligning dense carbon nanotube arrays

Device Technology Although semiconducting carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are promising candidates to replace silicon in transistors at extremely small dimensions, their purity, density, and alignment must be improved. Liu et al. combined a multiple dispersion sorting process, which improves purity, and a dimension-limited self-alignment process to produce well-aligned CNT arrays on a 10-centimeter silicon wafer. The density is sufficiently high (100 to 200 CNTs per micrometer) that large-scale integrated circuits could be fabricated. With ionic liquid gating, the performance metrics exceeded those of conventional silicon transistors with similar dimensions. Science , this issue p. [850][1] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aba5980