Thermal Dissipation and Variability in Electrical Breakdown of Carbon Nanotube Devices

Abstract

We study high-field electrical breakdown and heat dissipation from carbon nanotube (CNT) devices on SiO2 substrates. The thermal "footprint" of a CNT caused by van der Waals interactions with the substrate is revealed through molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Experiments and modeling find the CNT-substrate thermal coupling scales proportionally to CNT diameter and inversely with SiO2 surface roughness (~d/Δ). Comparison of diffuse mismatch modeling (DMM) and data reveals the upper limit of thermal coupling ~0.4 W/K/m per unit length at room temperature, and ~0.7 W/K/m at 600 C for the largest diameter (3-4 nm) CNTs. We also find semiconducting CNTs can break down prematurely, and display more breakdown variability due to dynamic shifts in threshold voltage, which metallic CNTs are immune to; this poses a fundamental challenge for selective electrical breakdowns in CNT electronics.

References in corpus (17)

• Thermal Conductance of an Individual Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube above Room Temperature
• High-Field Electrical Transport in Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes
• Negative Differential Conductance and Hot Phonons in Suspended Nanotube Molecular Wires
• Electrical and Thermal Transport in Metallic Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes on Insulating Substrates
• Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Thermal Boundary Conductance Between Carbon Nanotubes and SiO2
• Electron Transport and Hot Phonons in Carbon Nanotubes
• Ballistic Phonon Thermal Transport in Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes
• Thermal Probing of Energy Dissipation in Current-Carrying Carbon Nanotubes
• Reduction of Hysteresis for Carbon Nanotube Mobility Measurements Using Pulsed Characterization
• An essential mechanism of heat dissipation in carbon nanotube electronics
• Spatially-Resolved Temperature Measurements of Electrically-Heated Carbon Nanotubes
• Non-linear transport and heat dissipation in metallic carbon nanotubes
• The Role of Electrical and Thermal Contact Resistance for Joule Breakdown of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes
• Electric Field-Dependent Charge-Carrier Velocity in Semiconducting Carbon Nanotubes
• Multi-Band Mobility in Semiconducting Carbon Nanotubes
• Avalanche-Induced Current Enhancement in Semiconducting Carbon Nanotubes
• Inducing Chalcogenide Phase Change with Ultra-Narrow Carbon Nanotube Heaters

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Thermal and Thermoelectric Properties of Graphene
• In Situ Thermal Decomposition of Exfoliated Two-Dimensional Black Phosphorus
• Thermally-Limited Current Carrying Ability of Graphene Nanoribbons
• High-Field Electrical and Thermal Transport in Suspended Graphene
• Transport in Nanoribbon Interconnects Obtained from Graphene Grown by Chemical Vapor Deposition
• Reduction of Phonon Lifetimes and Thermal Conductivity of a Carbon Nanotube on Amorphous Silica
• Imaging Dissipation and Hot Spots in Carbon Nanotube Network Transistors
• Localized Triggering of the Insulator-Metal Transition in VO2 using a Single Carbon Nanotube
• Thermal Conductivity of Chirality-Sorted Carbon Nanotube Networks
• Frequency and Polarization Dependence of Thermal Coupling between Carbon Nanotubes and SiO2
• Electrical power dissipation in carbon nanotubes on single crystal quartz and amorphous SiO2
• Effects of Tip-Nanotube Interactions on Atomic Force Microscopy Imaging of Carbon Nanotubes
• Semiconducting enriched carbon nanotube align arrays of tunable density and their electrical transport properties
• The heat equation for nanoconstrictions in 2D materials with Joule self-heating
• Size scaling, dynamics, and electro-thermal bifurcation of VO2 Mott oscillators
• Unified 1D Theory and Design Principles for Harmonic Electrothermal Characterization of Nanoscale Conductors
• Transient microscopy for measuring heat transfer in single cells