Automated Removal of Metallic Carbon Nanotubes in a Nanotube Ensemble by Electrical Breakdown

Abstract

We present an automated electrical burning process to selectively eliminate conducting paths due to metallic and high-leakage ambipolar single-walled carbon nanotubes in aligned and randomly networked configurations of varying dimensions. Our algorithm is hysterisis immune and adjusts gate bias in between successive burn pulses to facilitate optimized electrical burning results. In back-gated devices, we show improvements in on/off ratio better than three orders of magnitude while achieving on-state current reduction of less than 25%. We also discuss important considerations that must be taken into account for obtaining good electrical burning results in top-gated devices.