Toward room temperature operation of dopant atom transistors

Abstract

As an extremely miniaturized Si transistor (MOSFET) close to the atomic scale, Dopant Atom Transistor is one of the promising candidates and the research field has been rapidly growing in the last decade. The dopant atom transistor consists of a dopant-induced quantum dot in the channel and its carrier transport is tunnelling of electrons or holes from the source to the drain through the single dopant atom. Until now, operation temperature has been mostly limited to 20 K or even below, since the ground state of the dopant is too shallow. In order to resolve this issue, we study potential deepening effect by application of a “cluster” or a “molecule” of dopant atoms, which is a number of dopant atoms closely gathering. As a result, it is shown that operation temperature approaches room temperature. In this work, a guiding principle for high temperature operation will be shown.