Abstract

Silicon technology has been the main driving force for miniaturizing electronic device dimensions to reduce cost and improve performance. However, Silicon industry is reaching to fundamental limits that size shrinking trend cannot be continued. Hence, alternative low dimensional materials such as Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have attracted great amount of attention to be used in the future electronic devices. Although, GNRs and CNTs carry promising electronic and transport characteristics, additional flexibility and control over fundamental properties like band gap level is highly desirable. In this thesis, three kinds of defects comprise of antidots, Boron Nitride (BN) doping, and uniaxial strain are used to modify intrinsic properties of GNRs and CNTs. Using Tight Binding (TB) with accompany of Non-equilibrium Green Function (NEGF), it is found that pristine properties of AGNR and ZCNT such as band gap can be modulated upon introduction of periodic antidot, BN defect topologies. Next, novel ZCNT RTD platform is designed by mean of defects, showing potential applications of defected ZCNT in fundamental electronic components such as RTDs. In addition, role of uniaxial strain on the performance of two AGNR RTD platforms is examined. Width-modified and field-modified AGNR RTD platforms go under both local and whole-body uniaxial strain. The analysis manifests that Peak to Valley Ratio (PVR) might be totally lost if imposed whole-body strain is strong enough. However, local strain can either totally damage the PVR or improve it up to 7 times, depending on the type of strain and utilized platform. As a result, AGNR RTDs may not be considered as the ideal candidates for the flexible electronics since their properties are subject to intense variation upon mechanical deformation. This mechanically dependent performance of AGNR RTDs would be promising in design of motion-based sensors.