As promising components of future integrated circuits (ICs), field-effect transistors (FETs) based on semiconducting nanomaterials are being extensively investigated. As the most essential component of ICs, inverters are favored to be demonstrated at the infant stage of emerging technologies. However, systematic research is absent to reveal how the parameters of transistors affect the performance of inverters, e.g. the voltage transfer characteristics (VTCs). In this work, systematic analysis about the dependency between transistor- and inverter-level metrics have been carried out for both complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) and monotype (p-type-only and n-type-only) technologies, which is further experimentally demonstrated by carbon nanotube FETs and ICs. We also propose guidelines towards the high noise margin and rail-to-rail inverter design based on nanomaterials.