Room Temperature Steady-State and Transient Carrier Transport Properties of Germanium Single Electron/Hole Transistors

A single electron transistor (SET) is an ultimate scheme of electronic devices for the purpose of controlling current with one charge precision based on Coulomb blockade effect. A SET could be used as a highly sensitive electrometer and might provide great potential applications for quantum information technology. For RT operation, the size of a Si-based QD should be less than 10 nm to prevent errors caused by thermal fluctuation. Nevertheless, control of nanometer-scaled thickness, area, and volume is not easy even when state of the art lithography and/or self-organization techniques are used. The solution we propose to alleviate this problem is to form Ge QDs by selective oxidation of Si_1-xGe_xSi-on-insulator (SOI) (Li et al., 2004). Using this method, Ge QDs are comparatively uniform and thermodynamically stable since Ge QDs are confined by the insulating layers. The proposed process is compatible to CMOS technology and can be easily adapted in the fabrication of embedded circuits