Quantum mechanical tunnelling in nanoelectronic circuits: Design of a nanoelectronic single-electron RAM

Abstract

Single-electronics is a nanoelectronic technology that makes possible the control of transport and position of a single or a small number of electrons. The fundamental physical principles of single-electronics are the quantum mechanical tunnelling and the Coulomb blockade. Bits of information are represented by the presence or absence of a single or a small number of electrons in conducting islands. The design and operation of two basic single-electron gates and the basic memory cell are presented. Furthermore, a single-electron random-access memory array is designed and its operation is analyzed using Monte Carlo simulation. Simulation shows that selective read and write operations can be performed in this memory array.

Degenerate solutions to the Dirac equation for massive particles and their applications in quantum tunneling

“…It is also interesting to examine the behavior of the transmittance through the potential barrier in the case of degenerate solutions. Based on equation (6) in [20], it is easy to calculate the transmission coefficient in the case of degenerate solutions (V 0 =E), given by the formula…”

“…However, in certain materials, as graphene [3,4] and semiconductors [5], the effective mass of the electrons can become much smaller than their actual mass. In this case, the maximum width of the barrier permitting non-negligible transmittance becomes much larger than 1pm, providing the opportunity for a wider variety of potential applications of our work, especially in fields related to nanotechnology, as nanoelectronics [6][7][8][9][10][11], graphene physics [12,13], nanophotonics [14,15], quantum measurements [16], etc. However, the main purpose of this article is to present of the new, interesting, physics predicted regarding the electromagnetic interactions of charged particles in the region of potential barriers.…”