Optical-reconfigurable carbon nanotube and indium-tin-oxide complementary thin-film transistor logic gates

• Published in: Nanoscale 2018-01, Vol.10 (27), p.13122-13129
• Main Authors: Zou, Jianping, Zhang, Kang, Cai, Weifan, Chen, Tupei, Nathan, Arokia, Zhang, Qing
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analog circuits; Carbon nanotubes; Field programmable gate arrays; Gates; Indium tin oxides; Integrated circuits; Logic circuits; Nanotubes; Optoelectronics; Semiconductor devices; Shadow masks; Thin film transistors; Titanium nitride; Transistor logic; Transistors; Ultraviolet radiation
• ISSN: 2040-3364; 2040-3372
• DOI: 10.1039/c8nr01358f

Optically transparent thin-film transistors (TFTs) have recently attracted significant attention for a new generation of transparent electronics where p- and n-channel transistors form the basic building block for complementary analog and digital integrated circuits (ICs). This paper reports a hybrid integration of p-channel carbon nanotube (CNT) and n-channel junctionless indium-tin-oxide (ITO) TFTs using a simple and cost-effective shadow mask-assisted fabrication process. The fabricated devices exhibit a high transmittance of ∼90% in the visible light region and function as inverters, NAND and NOR gates. More interestingly, distinct optoelectronic responses of the CNT- and ITO-TFTs to ultraviolet light have been clearly observed. In addition to conventional electrically gated logic operations, simple optical-reconfigurable logic operations have been realized with hybrid CNT/ITO-TFT based logic gates. The results suggest that introducing optical-modulation to the logic gates could increase the functionalities compared with the traditional electrically driven counterparts.