Carbon Nanotube Based Monolithic Millimeter-wave Integrated Circuits

In this project, we propose to develop a high-performance carbon nanotube (CNT) based millimeter-wave transistor technology and demonstrate monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MMICs) based on this technology with improved power efficiency, linearity, noise and dynamic range performance over existing GaAs, SiGe and RF-CMOS technologies. The goal of this topic is to leverage Professor Streit’s GaN RF fabrication experiences and Atom’s electronically pure CNT transistor developments toward creating a high-performance CNT-based transistor technology and wafer-scale monolithic integrated circuits at millimeter-wave frequencies that can be commercialized to outperform incumbent semiconductor high frequency technologies (GaAs, SiGe, RF-CMOS) yet at much lower cost. We will develop new pathways and process flow innovations in CNT alignment & deposition, material contact and doping to create high quality CNT arrays beyond current state-of-the-art for device engineering, and establish a robust process capable of producing high performance RF transistors and be scalable to wafer size to enable fabrication of monolithic integrated circuits based on CNTs. With these efforts, we expect to achieve prototype CNT RF transistors with the following metrics: DC: ION/W >500 mA/mm, ION/IOFF > 1000; RF: fT and fmax > 50GHz, and a third-order intercept (IP3) at least 10dB higher than its 1dB compression power (P1dB).