Abstract

Nanotechnology builds on advances in microelectronics for almost half a century. The miniaturization of electrical components greatly increased the utility and portability of computers, imaging equipment, microphones, and other electronics. Scaling down of electronic device sizes is the fundamental strategy for improving the performance of integrated circuits. The downscaling of sizes of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), yielding higher speeds and larger packing densities at a lower cost for each generation of manufacturing technology, has been the basis of the development of semiconductor industry for the past several decades [1,2]. However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the scaling of MOSFETs entered the deep sub-50 nm regime. In this deep nanoscaled regime, fundamental limits of MOSFETs and technological challenges with regard to the scaling of MOSFETs are encountered. In order to extend the prodigious progress of IC performance, it is essential to explore new design, architectures, and physical mechanisms in the search for the next device breakthrough. Next-generation nanoelectronic devices may have an operation principle effective to utilize quantum-mechanical effects for smaller dimensions and thus provide a new functionality beyond that is attainable with MOSFETs.