Carbon nanotube transistors scaled to a 40-nanometer footprint

Carbon nanotubes on the roadmap The formal challenge for high-performance transistors is to fit within ever smaller devices. They need to shrink from a lateral dimension of about 100 to 40 nanometers. Cao et al. fabricated tiny devices by using a single semiconducting carbon nanotubes, as well as arrays of these nanotubes. High performance (a high saturation on-state current >1.2 milliamperes per micrometer and a conductance >2 millisiemens per micrometer) was delivered by making end-bonded contacts to the nanotubes with cobalt-molybdenum alloys. Science , this issue p. 1369