Single-electron-based flexible multivalued logic gates

Abstract

Single-electron transistor (SET)-based multivalued (MV) not-AND (NAND) and not-OR (NOR) logic cells were implemented on a silicon-on-insulator chip. Depending on the ways of connecting two SETs with a field-effect transistor, the voltage transfer characteristics show typical NAND or NOR gate functions for various input voltages, which are binary, MV, and binary-MV mixed. Moreover, the switching functionality of our NAND (NOR) can convert to OR (AND) operation by simply adjusting their initial input voltages. These flexible two-input logic gates are expected to provide four basic arithmetic cells for the SET MV logic gate family.