Role of contacts in carbon nanotube giant piezoresistive sensors

From the perspective of wafer-level integration technologies, this work presents theoretical and experimental insights on fundamental device properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) based giant piezoresistive transducers. The role of contacts in such devices and their contribution to a significant tunneling-related sensitivity enhancement is demonstrated. The origin of this phenomenon is the strain dependence of the effective Schottky barrier (SB) width which is modulated by a drain-source voltage (VDS) dependent large built-in electric field F at the Schottky-barrier (SB), which defines the effective SB width and can be controlled via VDS. Moreover, perspectives for forthcoming sensor generations exposing operation regimes beyond intrinsic sensitivity are revealed.