Coulomb-blockade in nanometric Si-film silicon-on-nothing (SON) MOSFETs

The advantages of using architectures with gate nonoverlapped with source/drain have already been demonstrated in order to measure controlled single electron effects in planar MOSFETs. In this paper, we performed nonoverlapped silicon-on-nothing (SON) transistors with Si-film from 15 down to 9 nm. This leads to the fabrication of a quantum box (QB) defined by two lateral potential barriers in a thin Si-film (due to the camel´s back shape of the potential along the channel), and by two vertical potential barriers due to the gate oxide and to the buried dielectric of the SON architecture. This small volume device behaves like a quantum box, and we demonstrated that its own capacitance and consequently the Coulomb-blockade properties were mainly determined by the conduction film thickness. As the SON technology allows us to perform higly-performant fully depleted devices from bulk substrate, we will see in this paper that such devices can easily be adapted in order to fabricate three-dimensional QB, which becomes an alternative to fabricate SET with standard CMOS process.