What Everyone Needs to Know about Carbon-Based Nanocircuits`

Sustained exponential growth of complex electronic systems will require new breakthroughs in fabrication and assembly with controlled engineering of nanoscale components. In this article, we describe an emerging class of transistors whose channels are made from semiconducting carbon nanomaterials. These nanomaterials come in two forms: carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and graphene nanoribbons (GNRs). The research community has given specific attention to these two carbon allotropes because of their outstanding electrical properties, including high mobilities at room temperature, high current densities, and micronscale mean free paths. There are many possible transistor designs involving CNTs and GNRs, and each offers a unique set of benefits. They also face a number of challenges. This article covers the evolution of these designs, and highlights the works that have driven their development. It then introduces logic gates and small scale circuit structures that use these nanomaterial transistors. State of the art carbon nanomaterial modeling techniques and their application towards nanoscale VLSI circuit evaluation is discussed as well. At the end, we try to identify the opportunities and challenges involved in the adoption of carbon nanomaterials for building future electronics.