Carbon Nanotube Based Radio Frequency Transistors For K-Band Amplifiers

Owing to the combination of high carrier mobility and saturation velocity, low intrinsic capacitance, and excellent stability, the carbon nanotube (CNT) has been considered as a perfect semiconductor to construct radio frequency (RF) fieldeffect transistors (FETs) and circuits with an ultrahigh frequency band. However, the reported CNT RF FETs usually exhibited poor real performance indicated by the as-measured maximum oscillation frequency (f(max)), and then the amplifiers, which are the most important and fundamental RF circuits, suffered from a low power gain and a low frequency band. In this work, we build RF transistors on solution-derived randomly orientated CNT films with improved quality and uniformity. The randomly orientated CNT film FETs exhibit the record as-measured maximum f(max) of 90 GHz, demonstrating the potential for over 28 GHz (at least one-third of 90 GHz) 5G mmWave (frequency range 2) applications. Benefiting from the large-scale uniformity of CNT films, FETs are designed and fabricated with a large channel width to present low internal resistance for the standard 50 Omega impedance matching guide line, which is critical to construct an RF amplifier. Furthermore, we first demonstrate amplifiers with a maximum power gain up to 11 dB and output third-order intercept point (OIP3) of 15 dBm, both at the K-band, which represents the record of a CNT amplifier and is even comparable with a commercial amplifier based on III-V RF transistors.