A team of Georgia Tech researchers comprised of Dr. Satish Kumar from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Abhijit Chatterjee from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering were awarded $450,000 from National Science Foundation for energy efficient self-healing design of carbon nanotube thin film transistors.

Carbon nanotube (CNT) network based thin film transistors (CN-TFTs) are very promising for enhancing the performance of many large-area flexible-electronics applications such as displays, sensors, RF identification tags, and antennas. The awarded project will analyze and design energy-efficient and self-healing CN-TFT circuits considering the statistical and morphological fluctuations and self-heating effects in the thin film transistors. Researchers will develop a multi-scale computational framework comprising of atomistic model for CNT junctions ,and self-consistent electro-thermal model for transistors. The developed multi-scale framework will facilitate the design of energy efficient, high performance, and reliable CN-TFTs circuits and establish guidelines for decrease in power consumption, and hot spot temperature in these devices.

The lead investigator of the project, Satish Kumar, has been a faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2009. His research is focused on micro-nano scale electrical and thermal transport in microelectronics and nano-engineered systems.