Faculty Advisor(s): Ebert, Klimeck, Qiao

With transistors decreasing to nanometric dimensions, limits of current processing technologies are being reached. Many physical obstacles still need to be overcome to replace earlier silicon devices with Carbon NanoTube Field Effect Transistors (CNT FETs). Because of the minute size of the CNT FET channel, electron flow through the channel is no longer exclusively dependant on the gate voltage which produces a substantial leakage current. Scientific visualization techniques can prove to be highly successful in gaining a deeper understanding of the electrical behavior of the CNT FET. A two-step visualization method is used to observe the electrical field lines and equipotential surfaces around the device given a specific dataset. A Matlab code determines the electrical field vectors in the entire volume of the device and a trilinear interpolation allows obtaining their projection in any planar cross section. The electrical field in the selected plane is then rendered using the C++ OpenGL library and the ImageBased Flow Visualization technique. The resulting images enable researchers to analyze the influence of the transistor’s geometrical parameters on the electrical field, allowing potential development of the CNT FET.

If you reference this work in a publication, please cite as follows:

• Fort, Muriel; Hamdan, Sameer (2004), "Visualization of CNT FET Electrical Field Lines", http://www.nanohub.org/resources/745/, accessed on 2008-05-17 02:33:09.

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1. cyberinfrastructure
2. nanoelectronics