A novel fabrication process of hundreds of field effect transistors around one single carbon nanotube for molecular assembly*

Carbon nanotube field effect transistors (CNTFETs) can be used both as stand-alone electronic devices and as basis for other devices, but high-throughput fabrication remains an important challenge. In one specifically demanding application, CNTFETs are lithographically `cut' and rejoined with single molecules in the gap, to yield circuits for studying transport properties of single molecules. Because of the extreme precision required, such devices have a fabrication yield of only a few percent, which severely limits the speed of implementing CNT-molecule devices. In addition, the diversity of CNT structures provides an additional source of heterogeneity that makes collection of meaningful statistics difficult. Here we report a novel fabrication method to produce a chip with over 600 CNTFETs fabricated on one CNT. We use long (1cm) flow-aligned CNTs grown by chemical vapor deposition. Two photolithography steps are then used to pattern contacts and define a mask to burn away extra CNTs by oxygen plasma. We present the statistics of the transport properties of these devices including threshold voltage and on-state resistance. The devices are then lithographically cut and reconnected with DNA to provide consistent measurements of DNA conductance.