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Capillary flow printing of submicrometre carbon nanotube transistors

Nature Electronics volume 8, pages 1027–1037 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Printed transistors have a wide range of applications, but the limited resolution of printing techniques (10–30 µm) has been a barrier to utility and scalability. Printed submicrometre channel lengths have previously been achieved. However, this has required chemical processes or tedious post-processing, which limits applicability. Here we show that capillary flow printing can create submicrometre carbon nanotube thin-film transistors without chemical modification or physical manipulation after printing. We show that the approach can be used to print conducting, semiconducting and insulating inks on different types of substrate (silicon, Kapton and paper), and can be used to fabricate various thin-film transistor device architectures. The printed carbon nanotube thin-film transistors exhibit on-currents of 1.12 mA mm−1 when back gated on Si/SiO2 and 490 µA mm−1 when side gated through ion gel on Kapton. We also show that devices printed on Kapton offer mechanical bending and sweep rate resilience, illustrating the potential of these printed devices for flexible applications.

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Fig. 1: Capillary flow printer capabilities.
Fig. 2: CFP submicrometre CNT-TFTs.
Fig. 3: Electrical characterization of back-gated CFP submicrometre CNT-TFTs.
Fig. 4: Fully printed submicrometre CNT-TFTs.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award number 1R01HL146849 (A.D.F.) and from the National Science Foundation under award number CMMI 2245265 (A.D.F.). B.N.S. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant number 2139754. This work was performed in part at the Duke University Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF), which is a member of the North Carolina Research Triangle Nanotechnology Network (RTNN), and is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant ECCS-1542015) as part of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI). The content presented in this paper represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the funding organizations.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Brittany N. Smith, Faris M. Albarghouthi.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Brittany N. Smith, Faris M. Albarghouthi, James L. Doherty, Xuancheng Pei, Quentin Macfarlane, Matthew Salfity, Daniel Badia & Aaron D. Franklin

  2. Hummink Inc., Paris, France

    Marc Pascual, Pascal Boncenne, Nathan Bigan & Amin M’Barki

  3. Chemistry Department, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Aaron D. Franklin

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Contributions

B.N.S., F.M.A. and A.D.F. conceived of the study. B.N.S., F.M.A., J.L.D., X.P., Q.M., M.S. and D.B. fabricated and tested the devices. B.N.S. and F.M.A. contributed to figure design and data analysis. M.P., P.B., N.B. and A.M. contributed to AgNP ink development and print conditions for the submicrometre features. A.D.F. provided scientific guidance and supervised the project. B.N.S., F.M.A. and A.D.F. wrote the paper with revision and approval from all authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aaron D. Franklin.

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Competing interests

M.P., P.B., N.B. and A.M. are employees of Hummink, which develops and sells the NAZCA capillary flow printer. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Overview of capillary flow printing.

(a) Schematic of micropipette on tuning fork with a ~ 1.5 kHz resonance frequency. (b) Representative amplitude versus frequency shift of the pipette in and out of contact with the substrate, showing a ~ 3 Hz frequency shift when in contact with the substrate. (c) Schematic highlighting the ability of pipette to deposit ink over raised topologies due to the macroresonator detecting surface topology and piezoelectric moving the pipette to account for topology changes.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Effect of CNT ink concentration on CFP CNT-TFTs.

Subthreshold curves for five bottom-contacted, back-gated CNT-TFTs (on Si/SiO2) with CNT ink concentrations of (a) 50 µg/ml, (b) 37.5 µg/ml, and (c) 25 µg/ml printed at 50 µm/s and rinsed in toluene, showing the importance of higher CNT concentrations.

Extended Data Fig. 3 CNT density analysis.

(a-c) SEM images of CNT thin films printed with CFP on silicon. Bottom images set to binary using ImageJ to determine printed CNT density, averaging 54% CNT surface coverage in channel region. (d) SEM image of CNT thin film printed on silicon showing a channel width, Wch = 15.5 µm.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Extended benchmarking data for fully printed CNT-TFTs with Ag source and drain contacts.

Benchmarking plots of (a) width-normalized on-current vs channel length, (b) width-normalized on-current vs VDS, and (c) VDS vs Lch. Data for CNT-TFTs in this figure can be found in Extended Data Table 1.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Top gating CFP CNT-TFTs through CNC.

(a) Subthreshold curves at different VDS revealing the optimal VDS for CNC is −0.5 V. (b) Subthreshold characteristics depending on gate voltage sweep rate. (c) Hysteresis characteristics depending on gate voltage sweep rate. The subthreshold curves corresponding to 20 mV/s, 47 mV/s, 60 mV/s, and 88 mV/s sweep rates are shifted by −2 V, −1 V, 1 V, and 2 V, respectively, to make variations between sweeps visible. (d) Extracted hysteresis plotted as a function of sweep rate. (e) Image of top-gated CNT-TFT through CNC, where source, drain, and channel were CFP-printed and CNC and top gate were AJP-printed for all CNC top-gated devices. (f) Profilometry of AJP-printed CNC film.

Extended Data Table 1 Comparison table between this work and previous reports on fully printed CNT-TFTs
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–7 and Table 1.

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Smith, B.N., Albarghouthi, F.M., Doherty, J.L. et al. Capillary flow printing of submicrometre carbon nanotube transistors. Nat Electron 8, 1027–1037 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01470-7

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