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CMOS-compatible fabrication of room-temperature single-electron devices

Nature Nanotechnology volume 3, pages 603–608 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

Devices in which the transport and storage of single electrons are systematically controlled could lead to a new generation of nanoscale devices and sensors1,2,3. The attractive features of these devices include operation at extremely low power, scalability to the sub-nanometre regime and extremely high charge sensitivity4,5,6,7,8,9. However, the fabrication of single-electron devices requires nanoscale geometrical control, which has limited their fabrication to small numbers of devices at a time9,10,11,12,13,14,15, significantly restricting their implementation in practical devices. Here we report the parallel fabrication of single-electron devices, which results in multiple, individually addressable, single-electron devices that operate at room temperature. This was made possible using CMOS fabrication technology and implementing self-alignment of the source and drain electrodes, which are vertically separated by thin dielectric films. We demonstrate clear Coulomb staircase/blockade and Coulomb oscillations at room temperature and also at low temperatures.

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Figure 1: A new architecture for single-electron devices.
Figure 2: Fabrication of single-electron devices.
Figure 3: A field emission scanning electron microscope image after nanoparticle attachment.
Figure 4: Plot of I – V characteristics demonstrating Coulomb staircase and Coulomb blockade behaviour.
Figure 5: Single-electron transistors.

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Acknowledgements

We thank N. Michael for discussions. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (N00014-05-1-0030), National Science Foundation CAREER Award (ECS-0449958) and Advanced Research Program of Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (003656-0014-2006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, 76019, Texas, USA

    Vishva Ray, Ramkumar Subramanian, Pradeep Bhadrachalam, Liang-Chieh Ma, Choong-Un Kim & Seong Jin Koh

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  1. Vishva Ray
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  2. Ramkumar Subramanian
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Contributions

S.J.K., V.R., R.S. and C.-U.K. conceived and designed the experiments. V.R., R.S., P.B. and L.-C.M. performed the experiments. V.R. and S.J.K. analysed the data. S.J.K., V.R. and C.-U.K. wrote the paper. S.J.K. supervised all aspects of the project. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Seong Jin Koh.

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Ray, V., Subramanian, R., Bhadrachalam, P. et al. CMOS-compatible fabrication of room-temperature single-electron devices. Nature Nanotech 3, 603–608 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.267

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