Fabrication and characteristics of ultrashort-channel carbon nanotube field-effect transistors

We describe a technique for fabricating ultrashort-channel carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, using individual V2O5 nanowires as evaporation masks to define the conduction channel. The flexible and neat nanowires can be readily oriented to cross over the underlying nanotubes and produce a uniform nanogap of similar to 10 nm. The transport through such ultrashort nanotube devices shows a significant increase of subthreshold slope and leakage current in the off state, both of which are not observed in long-channel regime. These effects become more pronounced as the channel length is further shrunk and set fundamental constraints in transistor function of the current architecture. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics.