Improving the Electrical Contact Property of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Arrays by Electrodeposition

A parallel method for the fabrication of metal contacts on single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) arrays was presented and the electrical cm tact property was evaluated by a SWNT-field effect transistor structure. Copper and gold contacts were fabricated on both semiconducting SWNTs and metallic SWNTs by using a maskless electrodeposition process. The SWNT array remained a p-type semiconductor after the electrodeposition. The contact, resistance between SWNT array and microelectrodes was reduced more than 50% by the established copper contacts. The source-drain current of the carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNT-FET) structure can he further increased from 7.9 mu A to 9.2 mu A when the copper contacts were replaced by gold ones, which is probably due to the better contact property to SWNT of gold contacts with fine grain size.