There are two procedures in the single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) DEP (dielectrophoresis) assembly process, including the DEP and suspension removal. This paper mainly pays attention to the effects of the suspension removal procedure on the assembly efficiency. We found that the interaction energy between the SWCNTs and electrode metal materials plays a major role in preventing the arriving SWCNTs from getting off the electrodes when the suspension is blown-off, which will impact the DEP assembly yield of SWCNTs further. Three kinds of metal materials having various interaction energy with SWCNTs with the order of Ti>Hf>Al were chosen as the electrode materials and then the SWCNTs DEP assembly experiments were carried out. Our results show that the assembly yields exhibit the accordant order with that of the interaction energy of Ti>Hf>Al, which demonstrates our deduction.
IntroductionAfter the past two decades of intensive research on their intrinsic features and diverse application potential, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have evolved into studious application exploitations, especially for the CNT-based electronic devices, including transistors, chemical and biological sensors, diodes, and so forth. Because of the wide application in photovoltaic and betavoltaic microcells, infrared detectors and microwave rectifiers, SWCNT-based diodes have attracted immense research attention. They mainly have three structures, such as doped p-n junction, split-gates, and Schottky barrier (SB). Among them, the SB diode with an asymmetric configuration of "high-work-function (h) metal/SWCNT/low-work-function (l) metal" has the advantages of very simple fabrication and is doping-free resulting in avoiding the failure induced by dopant diffusion or freeze whether in high or extremely low temperatures. For the widespread application of SWCNT-based devices, one of the crucial obstacles of the state of the art is how to make the large-scale assembly of SWCNTs precise, efficient and compatible with conventional micro-fabrication technologies as well. Although the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) can achieve direct growth of SWCNTs on substrates [1], the high growth temperature makes it incompatible with the current complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies [1]. Post-synthesis assembly techniques are the promising alternative to the CVD technique owning to their very simple set-up and operation at room temperature [2][3][4]. DEP is advantageous over other post-processed techniques because it allows controlling the position and density of the assembled SWCNTs between pre-fabricated electrodes and