TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter deals with nanosized electronic devices. These are intensively studied in order to improve or even to replace the existing silicon electronic devices, which are still the building blocks of very complex integrated circuits incorporated in computers or advanced communication systems. Nanosized electronic devices are expected to increase the integration degree of logical devices on a single chip, and to reduce the dissipated power and the power consumption. They are also assumed to be faster than the actual electron devices and hence are believed to lead to an unprecedented increase in computing speed and the performance of communication systems; the cutoff frequency of nanosized electronic devices is very often a few THz. There are two main tendencies toward nanosize electronics: 1) to downscale the existing Si CMOS transistors to the nanoscale, where the carrier transport is no longer diffusive but ballistic, and 2) to find new innovative devices, such as ballistic devices, resonant tunneling diodes, or single-electron devices working at room temperature. New logical circuit configurations and new memory configurations are studied and fabricated using these new types of devices.
The FET (field-effect transistor) is a transistor whose behavior is controlled by an electrode called gate, capacitively coupled to the active region of the device. The gate is separated from this active semiconductor region called channel by an insulator or a depletion region. The two other terminals of the FET, named source and drain, respectively, terminate...
