Scientists Turn Carbon Nanotubes into Tiny Transistors
All of you know about the transistor which is a device that stimulate current flow and acts as a switch for electronic signals. Transistors contains of three layers of a semiconductor material, each capable of carrying a current.
In simple terms, Transistors, which are helps or used to switch and amplify electronic signals, are often known as the building blocks of all electronic devices, containing computers. The computer industry has been aimed on creating tiny and tiny transistors for decades, but faces the limitations of silicon.
In latest years, scientists have made significant methods in developing nanotransistors, that are so tiny that millions of them could fit onto the head of a pin.
Senior author Professor Dmitri Golberg, a researcher with the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science and the Centre for Materials Science and School of Chemistry and Physics at the Queensland University of Technology said that - “In this work, we have shown it is not impossible to maintain the electronic characteristics of an individual carbon nanotube”.
Professor Golberg and his colleagues started a small transistor by simultaneously applying a force and minimum current that heated a carbon nanotube made up of a few layers until outer tube shells separate, leaving just a single-layer nanotube in the new study.
The heat and strain then changed the chirality of the nanotube, meaning the pattern in which the carbon atoms linked together to make the single-atomic layer of the nanotube wall was rearranged. The review of the new structure links to the carbon atoms was that the nanotube was transformed into a transistor.
First author Dr. Dai-Ming Tang, a researcher with the International Centre for Materials Nanoarchitectonics at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science said that- “The research demonstrated the capability to manipulate the molecular characteristics of the nanotube to fabricated nanoscale electrical device. Semiconducting carbon nanotubes are promising for fabricating energy-efficient nanotransistors to build beyond-silicon microprocessors.
However, it remains a great challenge to maintain the chirality of individual carbon nanotubes, which uniquely describes the atomic geometry and electronic structure. In this work, we designed and fabricated carbon nanotube intramolecular transistors by altering the local chirality of a metallic nanotube segment by heating and mechanical strain.”
Professor Golberg said that- The study in demonstrating the fundamental science in building the small transistor was a promising method towards building beyond silicon-microprocessors.
