SGER: Nanoelectronic Functional Devices

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9523423 Roychowdhury Continuing advances in the miniaturization of electron devices have made possible the fabrication of nanoelectric devices with feature sizes in the 1-100nm range. However, it is widely believed that conventional integrated circuit design techniques will become impractical, due to the small size and the low current carrying capacity of nanostructured devices. Proposals which envision novel ways to circumvent this problem have begun to appear in earnest. The majority of these proposals use globally coherent quantum systems to generate computational abilities. We differ from these proposals in that we use semiclassical global models as the basis from which to conceive nanoelectronic functional devices. An additional point of departure, is our assumption that currently perceived limitations to realizing interconnects amongst the nanostructured devices will in time be overcome. Finally, we restrict attention to niche applications, in which the collective activity of a large number of nanostructured devices give rise to useful computational functions. The special purpose functional device concept adopted here can be contrasted with other approaches which envision the design of general purpose computers on the basis of quantum mechanical logic gates. This work has been unified under a particular technology based on the creation of arrays of nanometer-sized metallic islands. We consider different types of network mechanisms for the transfer of electrons between islands. Depending on the types of transport nonlinearities permitted by the network links, we show that it is possible to generated different kinds of global activity in these networks. We show, in addition that it is possible to impart a computational interpretation to these global activities. In particular, we show that within a classical circuit theoretic model, non-monotone nonlinearities in the local transport can yield global associative memory effects. We then show that this interpretation will remain valid even when single-electron effects come into play, provided that the effective capacitance of the nanometallic islands is not too small. We then investigate networks of islands in which the sole nonlinearity arises from single-electronics. These networks are shown to be capable of associative memory effects, as well as yield approximate solutions to certain NP-complete optimization problems, provided that there is sufficient flexibility in the choice of inter-island capacitances. Proposed future work includes: (a) Development of novel theoretical techniques for the analysis and design of nanoelectronic networks, (b) Development of detailed simulators for nanoelectronic functional devices on parallel machines, and (c) Incorporation of novel nanoelectronic device and network mechanisms in functional devices. ***