Two groups of researchers have recently published papers demonstrating advances in creating, sorting and organizing carbon nanotubes so they can be used in electronics.

Stanford electrical engineers addressed the problem of getting nanotubes straightened out so they could be put to work in chips, by growing the nanotubes on crystalline quartz, where they grow in orderly rows, then transferring them to a silicon wafer.

Samsung chemical engineers used a substrate of aminosilanes. The resulting nanotubes were almost entirely semiconducting, while substrates of aromatic compounds (such as phenyls) produced metallic nanotubes.