Novel carbon nanotube deposition system for fabricating nano devices

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are found to be promising material for nanoelectronics due to its ultra small size and unique properties. It provides the possibility of miniaturizing conventional electronic devices, and therefore, people have focused on exploring its applications in nanoelectronics, such as replacing the conventional transistors, resisters and sensors, etc. In order to study its properties and use them as novel devices, methods to manipulate such nano sized particles on micro electrodes have to be developed. Since the size of CNTs is in nano scale, traditional robotic manipulation and assembly cannot be applied. A novel and effective CNT manipulation method is developed and presented in this paper. An automatic and robotic CNT deposition system is used to manipulate CNT across micro electrodes precisely by dielectrophertic (DEP) force. It is also integrated with micromanipulator, micro pump and micro pipette to deposit CNT dilution in desired positions of micro electrodes. This system can potentially be used to fabricate and manufacture an array of CNT based sensors, resulting in a fast, automatic and feasible method for batch making and assembling nano devices. © 2007 IEEE.