Electrons in Silicon Microstructures

Abstract

Silicon microstructures only a few hundred atoms wide can be fabricated and used to study electron transport in narrow channels. Spatially localized voltage probes as close together as 0.1 micrometer can be used to investigate a variety of physical phenomena, including velocity saturation due to phonon emission, the local potentials caused by scattering from a single trapped electron, and quantum tunneling or hopping among very few electron states.

Particulate Contamination and Microelectronics Manufacturing: An Introduction

“…Current and projected cell sizes for DRAMS are: 1 megabit (1 Mb), now commercially available, 30 pm2; 4 Mb, 1989, 13 pm2;16 Mb, 1992, 5 pm2;64 Mb, 1995,2 pm2 (Robinson, 1986a. Research structures have been reported with features nearly 100 times smaller than those used in commercial integrated circuits (Howard et al, 1986). A transistor that recently set a speed record of 6-ps switching time had an undoped gallium arsenide spacer layer of 20 to 40 A (Robinson, 1986b).…”

Physical One-Way Functions

“…There are many similarities between the propagation of light through disordered microstructures and that of electrons through disordered wires. It has been shown, at very low temperatures, that the conductance of disordered wired fluctuates in much the same way as speckle, and the mathematical treatment of conductance fluctuations is identical to that of speckle [78][79] [80]. Given this, I can imagine that it would be possible to use POWFs to generate unique identifiers using silicon microstructures.…”

Electronic thermal capacity in one-dimensional mesoscopic rings

“…After some years Cheung, Gefen and Riedel [5] studied in detail the function dependences of the persistent current with respect to the temperature, flux, ring circumference, chemical potential and the randomness in the analytical calculations and computer simulations. Their calculations conf'wmed further the idea presented by Landauer et al Up to now, the existence of the persistent current has been justified by many experiments [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

“…In the past decades, the quantum interference effects in mesoscopic systems have been extensively discussed theoretically and measured experimentally with the study of electric conductances and persistent currents [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”