Application of Single Electron Devices Utilizing Stochastic Dynamics

The semiconductor integrated circuit technology has formed the basis of today’s information oriented society and supported its continuous progress. However, several problems such as high power density and quantum effects have been serious recently. On the other hand, recent development of nanotechnologies realizes the use of a nano-scale device for us. On such a tiny tunnel junction, electron tunneling is restricted by the Coulomb force between electrons, and this phenomenon is called Coulomb blockade. A single electron device based on the Coulomb blockade is one of the candidate devices which can overcome the difficulties of conventional LSIs. It has various advantages such as extreme low power consumption, high charge sensitivity, fine electron flow controllability, small area occupancy, and so on. Representative applications are charge detection, quantum computing, and current standard, etc. On the other hand, its low gain property and stochastic operation could be main obstacles when we apply it to a conventional ABSTRACT