Ku-Band Mixers Based on Random-Oriented Carbon Nanotube Films

Overview

Journal Nanomaterials (Basel)

Date 2024 Mar 12

PMID 38470780

Authors

Mengnan Chang

JiaLe Qian

Zhaohui Li

Xiaohan Cheng

Ying Wang

Ling Fan

Juexian Cao

Li Ding

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are a type of nanomaterial that have excellent electrical properties such as high carrier mobility, high saturation velocity, and small inherent capacitance, showing great promise in radio frequency (RF) applications. Decades of development have been made mainly on cut-off frequency and amplification; however, frequency conversion for RF transceivers, such as CNT-based mixers, has been rarely reported. In this work, based on randomly oriented carbon nanotube films, we focused on exploring the frequency conversion capability of CNT-based RF mixers. CNT-based RF transistors were designed and fabricated with a gate length of 50 nm and gate width of 100 μm to obtain nearly 30 mA of total current and 34 mS of transconductance. The Champion RF transistor has demonstrated cut-off frequencies of 78 GHz and 60 GHz for and , respectively. CNT-based mixers achieve high conversion gain from -11.4 dB to -17.5 dB at 10 to 15 GHz in the X and Ku bands. Additionally, linearity is achieved with an input third intercept (IIP3) of 18 dBm. It is worth noting that the results from this work have no matching technology or tuning instrument assistance, which lay the foundations for the application of Ku band transceivers integrated with CNT amplifiers.

References

Lin Y, Valdes-Garcia A, Han S, Farmer D, Meric I, Sun Y . Wafer-scale graphene integrated circuit. Science. 2011; 332(6035):1294-7. DOI: 10.1126/science.1204428. View

Rutherglen C, Jain D, Burke P . Nanotube electronics for radiofrequency applications. Nat Nanotechnol. 2009; 4(12):811-9. DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2009.355. View

Lyu H, Wu H, Liu J, Lu Q, Zhang J, Wu X . Double-Balanced Graphene Integrated Mixer with Outstanding Linearity. Nano Lett. 2015; 15(10):6677-82. DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02503. View

Gao Q, Zhang Z, Xu X, Song J, Li X, Wu Y . Scalable high performance radio frequency electronics based on large domain bilayer MoS. Nat Commun. 2018; 9(1):4778. PMC: 6235828. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07135-8. View

Fujii M, Zhang X, Xie H, Ago H, Takahashi K, Ikuta T . Measuring the thermal conductivity of a single carbon nanotube. Phys Rev Lett. 2005; 95(6):065502. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.065502. View

Zhong D, Shi H, Ding L, Zhao C, Liu J, Zhou J . Carbon Nanotube Film-Based Radio Frequency Transistors with Maximum Oscillation Frequency above 100 GHz. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2019; 11(45):42496-42503. DOI: 10.1021/acsami.9b15334. View

Franklin A . Electronics: the road to carbon nanotube transistors. Nature. 2013; 498(7455):443-4. DOI: 10.1038/498443a. View

Yang Y, Ding L, Han J, Zhang Z, Peng L . High-Performance Complementary Transistors and Medium-Scale Integrated Circuits Based on Carbon Nanotube Thin Films. ACS Nano. 2017; 11(4):4124-4132. DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b00861. View

Zhou J, Liu L, Shi H, Zhu M, Cheng X, Ren L . Carbon Nanotube Based Radio Frequency Transistors for K-Band Amplifiers. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2021; 13(31):37475-37482. DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c07782. View

10.

Cao Y, Brady G, Gui H, Rutherglen C, Arnold M, Zhou C . Radio Frequency Transistors Using Aligned Semiconducting Carbon Nanotubes with Current-Gain Cutoff Frequency and Maximum Oscillation Frequency Simultaneously Greater than 70 GHz. ACS Nano. 2016; 10(7):6782-90. DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.6b02395. View

11.

Wang C, Chien J, Takei K, Takahashi T, Nah J, Niknejad A . Extremely bendable, high-performance integrated circuits using semiconducting carbon nanotube networks for digital, analog, and radio-frequency applications. Nano Lett. 2012; 12(3):1527-33. DOI: 10.1021/nl2043375. View

12.

Zhou X, Park J, Huang S, Liu J, McEuen P . Band structure, phonon scattering, and the performance limit of single-walled carbon nanotube transistors. Phys Rev Lett. 2005; 95(14):146805. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.146805. View

13.

Ma Z, Han J, Yao S, Wang S, Peng L . Improving the Performance and Uniformity of Carbon-Nanotube-Network-Based Photodiodes via Yttrium Oxide Coating and Decoating. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2019; 11(12):11736-11742. DOI: 10.1021/acsami.8b21325. View

14.

Che Y, Lin Y, Kim P, Zhou C . T-gate aligned nanotube radio frequency transistors and circuits with superior performance. ACS Nano. 2013; 7(5):4343-50. DOI: 10.1021/nn400847r. View

15.

Chen B, Zhang P, Ding L, Han J, Qiu S, Li Q . Highly Uniform Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors and Medium Scale Integrated Circuits. Nano Lett. 2016; 16(8):5120-8. DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b02046. View

16.

Gu J, Han J, Liu D, Yu X, Kang L, Qiu S . Solution-Processable High-Purity Semiconducting SWCNTs for Large-Area Fabrication of High-Performance Thin-Film Transistors. Small. 2016; 12(36):4993-4999. DOI: 10.1002/smll.201600398. View

17.

Avouris P, Chen Z, Perebeinos V . Carbon-based electronics. Nat Nanotechnol. 2008; 2(10):605-15. DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2007.300. View

18.

Geier M, McMorrow J, Xu W, Zhu J, Kim C, Marks T . Solution-processed carbon nanotube thin-film complementary static random access memory. Nat Nanotechnol. 2015; 10(11):944-8. DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2015.197. View