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Power consumption of today’s integrated circuit is very difficult to reduce because the MOSFET is subjected to the thermal limit of 60 mV/decade for the subthreshold swing (SS). In this paper, we show that this SS limit of thermionic current can be conquered—thus power consumption drastically reduced by density of states (DOS) engineering at the source. Specifically, the linear DOS of Dirac electrons at the source concomitant with an efficient gate control brings the SS limit down to 37 mV/decade, and further down to very small values by suppressing the thermal tail contribution with a small bandgap in the injected DOS. Using the first principles analysis, we demonstrate that FETs with Dirac source to possess extremely promising device performance in both energy dynamic power and switching speed at the ultralow operating voltage regime of 0.3 V compared with ultrathin-body Si FETs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While constructing general integrated circuits (ICs)with field-effecttransistors (FETs) built on individual CNTs is among few viable waysto build ICs with small dimension and high performance that can becompared with that of state-of-the-art Si based ICs, this has notbeen demonstrated owing to the absence of valid and well-tolerantfabrication method. Here we demonstrate a modularized method for constructinggeneral ICs on individual CNTs with different electric properties.A pass-transistor-logic style 8-transistor (8-T) unit is built, demonstratedas a multifunctional function generator with good tolerance to inhomogeneityin the CNTs used and used as a building block for constructing generalICs. As an example, an 8-bits BUS system that is widely used to transferdata between different systems in a computer is constructed. Thisis the most complicated IC fabricated on individual CNTs to date,containing 46 FETs built on six individual semiconducting CNTs. The8-T unit provides a good basis for constructing complex ICs to explorethe potential and limits of CNT ICs given the current imperfectionin available CNT materials and may also be developed into a universaland efficient way for constructing general ICs on ideal CNT materialsin the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]