Carbon nanotubes have generated much interest in the last few years for application in electronic devices because of their demonstrated ability to serve as a possible alternative to silicon technology for fabrication of nanoscale electronic devices, in view of the challenges faced by the continuous scaling of existing silicon technology. Much effort has been applied into the understanding of the underlying principles and the device physics of carbon nanotubes as also in the fabrication of suitable devices with various geometries. The current simulation approaches used for generating reliable device characteristics for these devices can be highly complex and are most often computationally intensive. There is, therefore, a need to develop alternative approaches that are simple and computationally less intensive and yet adequately accurate, especially in the context of design and evaluation of circuits using these devices.
In this thesis, we have performed a detailed study of the working principles of semiconducting carbon nanotubes with the objective of developing compact models that can replicate, with good accuracy, the current-voltage characteristics of these devices. Specifically, compact models have been developed for the current - voltage characteristics for the cylindrical gate Schottky-Barrier Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor (SB-CNFET), consistent with experimental results published in the literature. These models reflect the dependence of the transistor characteristics on various physical parameters such as different dielectrics and different gate insulator thicknesses. These compact models can be readily integrated into any of the existing Hardware Description Languages for building and evaluating circuits based on SB-CNFET or hybrid CMOS/ CNFET technology.