A network of carbon nanotubes with high alignment was synthesized on a gold-patterned quartz substrate due to the different growth rates of nanotubes on An and quartz. Controlled fabrication of nanotube networks on a large area could be realized simply by treating the An film into a corresponding pattern. This provides a practical way to obtain aligned nanotube networks on combined substrates for further building large-scale functional devices. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.