Tunnel Junction Engineering for Optimized Metallic Single-Electron Transistor

Single electron transistor: energy-level broadening effect and thermionic contribution

“…One can easily distinguish the effect of variation of energy level broadening. As we know, in the metallic QD, a single energy level lead to equality of the current peaks [24,26]. However, in semiconductor QD, the current peaks are not equal, due to the contribution of broadening of energy level.…”

“…It has been made to overcome the problem of power consumption and to open the way for building nanoscale architectures. Different materials have been used to realize SET devices such as metals [4], semiconductors [5], carbon nanotubes, [6], graphene [7] and single molecules [8,9]. Furthermore, SET device has been performed to obey many required applications such as logic device [10], radio−frequency [11], gas sensor [12] and single electron memory [13].…”

A Fabrication Process for Emerging Nanoelectronic Devices Based on Oxide Tunnel Junctions

“…TiO 2 , SiO 2 , and HfO 2 oxide junctions, as presented in the devices section, have been deposited by means of physical vapor deposition (PVD) or grown using plasma oxidation. ALD allows subnanometer thickness control, highly conformable deposition, and reproducible dielectrics quality and can be used for multiple material crested barriers [8], while plasma oxidation is a simple, lowcost process that leads to a single material junction that is the metal island oxide. A thick metal layer, approximately 2 times the trench depth, is deposited by PVD to ensure good conformity and void-free trench filling [5] (step 4 of Figure 1).…”

“…The MIM junction is the building block of the different nanoelectronic devices proposed in this paper, and the MIM oxide capacitors that are essential passive devices widely used in the microelectronic industry integrated circuit fabrication. They can be exploited for more fundamental research purposes such as dielectric or dielectric stacking [8,9] permittivity and barrier height extraction at the nanometer scale. Finally, as it will be shown here, they are excellent devices to evaluate the effect of the fabrication procedure, materials, and deposition methods on the junction and characterize its aging and performance before using it in a circuit.…”

“…Reducing the tunnel oxide , increasing its thickness, and reducing the junction cross section would increase the charging energy to reach room temperature operation [16]. For that purpose, the tunnel oxide permittivity can be tuned using barrier engineering and ALD [8]; the tunnel junction width can be decreased combining more aggressive lithography and trench filling using ALD, while the island thickness can be reduced to few nm with CMP as in [5].…”