Ink-Jet Printable #Nanotube #Transistors Made Easy #Semiconductor #Nanotech

Carbon nanotubes hold the promise of succeeding silicon circuits, plus can be fabricated atop cheap plastic substrates to enable "spray on" electronics using ink-jet printers. Look for easy-to-use ink-jet printable electronics to proliferate into a variety of applications over the rest of the decade. R.C.J.


Today a great deal of energy is being expended in research organizations to refine and perfect methods of sorting nanotubes so that ink can be produced that is conducting, semiconducting and insulating. With inks in hand, transistors and other circuit elements can be printed by ink-jet printers on flexible polymer substrates. Now Rice University researchers claim to have found a method that sidesteps the costly and difficult sorting step, enabling unsorted nanotube circuitry to be ink-jet printable without presorting. The relatively simple method discovered by Rice faculty Fellow Robert Vajtai and professor Pulickel Ajayan, ink-jet prints unsorted nanotubes in layers. By controlling the number of layers printed on each circuit trace, the researchers demonstrated how to ink-jet print the source, drain and dielectrics necessary to create field-effect transistors...
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