Carbon nanotube transistors outperform silicon

Carbon nanotube transistors have so far lagged far behind semiconductors in high-performance electronics. Now, for the first time, materials engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison team created carbon nanotube transistors that achieved a current 1.9 times higher than silicon transistors.

“This achievement has been a dream of nanotechnology for the last 20 years,” said Michael Arnold, a UW-Madison professor of materials science and engineering.

“Making carbon nanotube transistors that are better than silicon transistors is a big milestone. This breakthrough in carbon nanotube transistor performance is a critical advance toward exploiting carbon nanotubes in logic, high-speed communications and other semiconductor electronics technologies.”

The advance could pave the way for carbon nanotube transistors to replace silicon transistors and continue delivering the performance gains the computer industry relies on and that consumers demand, the engineers say. The new transistors are particularly promising for wireless communications technologies that require a lot of current flowing across a relatively small area.

The researchers reported their advance in a paper published in Science Advances.

Image credit: Stephanie Precourt.