Automated process for manufacturing carbon nanotube (CNT) based nano devices

Abstract

This paper presents a novel automated manufacturing process for mass producing nano devices with superior and advanced material, Carbon nanotubes (CNTs). CNTs are found to be a promising material for nanoelectronics due to their sizes and unique properties. Conventional electronic devices replaced by CNT are possibly to be miniature and provide better performance, and therefore, people have focused on developing a method to produce CNT based nano devices. Electrical assembly of CNTs is one of the promising methods to manipulate the CNT in place and apply them in such applications. Since the size of CNTs is in nano scale, traditional robotic manipulation cannot be applied. Building single CNT device is challenging and therefore, most people have concentrated on manipulating bundled CNTs. However, the electrical property of bundled CNTs is difficult to control, and resulting the device cannot benefit from quantum properties of single CNT. Therefore, an automated process for manufacturing single CNT based nano devices is developed. A CNT deposition system is developed to manipulate single CNT across microelectrodes precisely and repeatedly by dielectrophoresis (DEP). Moreover, different types of CNTs can be selected by using a micro chamber to filter specific electronic property of CNTs. The system can potentially be used to fabricate an array of CNT based devices, and a fast and feasible batch nano assembly of consistent nano devices can be achieved.