Dc Behaviour of Planar Carbon Nanotube Field-effect Transistors

The carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNFET) has attracted a great deal of interest due to predictions of its superior performance over that of ultimately-scaled silicon MOSFETs [1, 2]. While significant progress has been made in predicting its behaviour, simulations have primarily focused on azimuthally invariant structures, such as the cylindrically-gated CNFET [2, 3]. While this may be an ideal structure in terms of reducing short-channel effects, it poses serious difficulties in terms of its realization, and as a result, rigorous experimental verification of the theoretical models has proved difficult. Some preliminary work has been performed in simulating planar structures [4], however, it is not clear in that work if azimuthal variation in the electrostatics has been neglected in order to effectively reduce the nanotube simulation to one dimension.