A Critical Review of the Role of Carbon Nanotubes in the Progress of Next-Generation Electronic Applications

Abstract

Electronic products are becoming an essential part of our daily life. There is a huge demand to produce small and portable but powerful electronic products. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have excellent electrical, mechanical and thermal properties which can be exploited to build next-generation electronics. This paper reviews different types and properties of CNTs and also presents the CNT-based electronics along with their advantage over the conventionally used products. CNT usage in electronics, such as biosensing, energy and data storage devices, is discussed. CNT-based field emission devices, which showed outstanding results are also discussed. The current challenges of CNT-based electronics and the future of CNT in electronics applications are mentioned.

Keywords: Carbon nanotubes; electronics applications; properties of CNTs.

Fig. 1

Schematic structure of defect-free (a) SWCNT, (b) DWCNT, (c) MWCNT (reprinted from reference , under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license).

Fig. 2

A schematic image of components of the chiral vector $\overrightarrow{C}$ and the direction of nanotube axis for armchair, zigzag and chiral CNTs (reprinted from reference , under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license).

Fig. 3

Schematics of zigzag, armchair, chiral SWCNT (reprinted from reference , under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license).

Fig. 4

The graph of specific heat vs. temperature of graphene, graphite, SWCNT rope and SWCNT (data from reference 36).

Fig. 5

A schematic image of CNT-FET (adapted from 22).

Fig. 6

A microscopic image of a Y-junction in a CNT (reprinted with permission from , Gothard et al., Nano Letters 2004, 4, 2, 213–217. © 2003, American Chemical Society).

Fig. 7

Cantilevered CNT-based data storage device, (a) non-conducting state 0’, (b) conducting state 1’ (adapted from 14).

Fig. 8

Vertically aligned CNT data storage device, (a) non-conducting state 0’ (b) conducting state 1’ (adapted from 14).

Fig. 9

Suspended CNT-based data storage device, (a) non-conducting state 0’ (b) conducting state 1’ (adapted from 14).

Fig. 10

Telescoping CNT-based memory cell, (a) non-conducting state 0’ (b) conducting state 1’ (adapted from 14).

Fig. 11

A schematic model of nano tweezers (adapted from 8).

Fig. 12

Drain current with respect to time for a gate bias of − 10 V and a source bias of − 100 mV (reprinted with permission from , Someya et al., Nano Lett. 3, 877 (2003).© 2003, American Chemical Society).