University of Illinois Urbana Champaign: Reseachers affiliated with Nano-CEMMS at UIUC and Purdue University have created high-performance Nanonet circuits with many potential areas of application in electronics.
John Rogers, Moonsub Shim, and colleagues have implemented a carbon-based semiconductor consisting of sub-monolayer, random networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes that yields small to medium sized integrated digital circuits. Their "nanonet" technology bypasses a typical flaw in carbon nanotube-based circuitry -- short circuits -- by cutting the nanonet into strips to break the path of metallic nanotubes. By doing so, the researchers were able to produce a flexible circuit containing nearly 100 transistors with excellent mobilities, operating voltages, and switching speeds.
Laboratory work at UIUC was complemented by theory and simulation work conducted at Purdue.
Cao, Q., H. Kim, N. Pimparkar, et al. Medium-scale carbon nanotube thin-film integrated circuits on flexible plastic substrates. Nature 454 (2008) 496-500.
