Single Electron Tunneling Transistor with Tunable Barriers

by Akira Fujiwara et al. Applied Physics Letters, 30 Jan 2006 We have achieved the operation of single-electron tunneling (SET) transistors with gate-induced electrostatic barriers using silicon nanowire metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor structures. The conductance of tunnel barriers is tunable by more than three orders of magnitude. By using the flexible control of the tunable barriers, the systematic evolution from a single charge island to double islands was clearly observed. We obtained excellent reproducibility in the gate capacitances: values on the order of 10 aF, with the variation smaller than 1 aF. This flexibility and controllability both demonstrate that the device is highly designable to build a variety of SET devices based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. Read more