Digital Circuits and Systems based on Single-Electron Tunneling Technology

Abstract

In this work, digital circuits and systems based on single-electron tunneling technology will be presented and analyzed. A simple design methodology will be proposed using a programmable single-electron NAND/NOR gate as a building block. Aspects such as operating temperature, noise, and charge fluctuations will be discussed. SET devices can reach ultra-low power consumption and high frequencies during operation. Although there are already many digital SET circuits and systems previously proposed and studied, there are few works about design methodology for SETs. This study shows a proposal for designing combinational and sequential singleelectron circuits aiming at systems design. In the end, this work reinforces the use of single-electron technology as a possible large scale device in the future.