Variance analysis of the Coulomb blockade parameters in nanometer-size disordered arrays

Abstract

Recently, Coulomb blockade could be observed up to room temperature on devices with arrays. As they are highly disordered, an important dispersion of the electrical characteristics is expected. We calculate the dispersion of the Coulomb blockade threshold voltage Vth, for disordered arrays. At very low temperature, Vth increases with the array size, as well for one-dimensional (1D) as for two-dimensional (2D) arrays, and the relative dispersion remains smaller than 10%. Such a promising behavior does not hold at higher temperatures. On one hand, a larger gain in Vth with the array size is only obtained on 1D arrays. On the other one, the dispersion rapidly becomes catastrophic for both 1D and 2D cases. We propose a way to reduce it to a range of 10%–15%, almost compatible with very large scale integration applications.