Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Based on Aligned Carbon Nanotubes

Low-dimensional semiconductors have been extensively studied for constructing ultrascaled and high-performance transistors for potential application in digital integrated circuits (ICs) in sub-1 nm technology nodes. Many ICs on various nanomaterials have been continuously demonstrated, but few works have presented both high performance and a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) architecture, which are necessary for forming ultralarge-scale digital ICs. In this work, we fabricated symmetric CMOS field-effect transistors (FETs) on aligned semiconducting carbon nanotubes (A-CNTs) with high performance and a high yield. Typical basic functional units, including an inverter, a NAND gate, and a static random-access memory (SRAM) cell consisting of the A-CNT CMOS FETs, were realized with rail-to-rail output even under a low VDD down to 0.1 V, and a three-bit decoder consisting of 70 CNT CMOS FETs demonstrated scalable integration. Furthermore, 5-stage ring oscillators consisting of CNT CMOS FETs with a 300 nm gate length exhibited an oscillating frequency of 1.13 GHz, indicating a stage delay of 88 ps, which represents the demonstration of A-CNT-based CMOS ICs operating at GHz frequencies. The achievement in scalable integration of high-performance CNT CMOS FETs and ICs demonstrates the potential of carbon-based electronics in digital IC applications for advanced technology nodes.