Carbon Nanotube Based Radio Frequency Transistors for K-Band Amplifiers

Owing to the combination of high carrier mobility and saturation velocity, low intrinsic capacitance, and excellent stability, the carbon nanotube (CNT) has been considered as a perfect semiconductor to construct radio frequency (RF) field-effect transistors (FETs) and circuits with an ultrahigh frequency band. However, the reported CNT RF FETs usually exhibited poor real performance indicated by the as-measured maximum oscillation frequency (fmax), and then the amplifiers, which are the most important and fundamental RF circuits, suffered from a low power gain and a low frequency band. In this work, we build RF transistors on solution-derived randomly orientated CNT films with improved quality and uniformity. The randomly orientated CNT film FETs exhibit the record as-measured maximum fmax of 90 GHz, demonstrating the potential for over 28 GHz (at least one-third of 90 GHz) 5G mmWave (frequency range 2) applications. Benefiting from the large-scale uniformity of CNT films, FETs are designed and fabricated with a large channel width to present low internal resistance for the standard 50 Ω impedance matching guide line, which is critical to construct an RF amplifier. Furthermore, we first demonstrate amplifiers with a maximum power gain up to 11 dB and output third-order intercept point (OIP3) of 15 dBm, both at the K-band, which represents the record of a CNT amplifier and is even comparable with a commercial amplifier based on III–V RF transistors.