Combinational logic based on chemically designed cluster-ligand systems with electrical addressing of quantum states

我们提出利用自组装交换耦合的纳米点阵列的电子量子态来开发原型组合逻辑机。小核金团簇将被合适的配体功能化。纳米电极将以电的方式处理由几个点组装而成的阵列的状态。理论将考虑电荷转移的库仑阻塞，无序的不同方面和配体的作用来确定可能的状态。该设计寻求超越开关阵列，并直接集成布尔运算，以实现逻辑门，如半加法器和全加法器，在几个点阵列上。我们的目标是制造一个在室温下工作的逻辑门的演示器，进行电子传递研究，验证计算结果，并利用理论进一步优化性能。为此，将合成具有明确核尺寸小于2纳米的功能金团簇。这些将通过定向自组装过程在光刻上预先定义的纳米电极和在第二阶段定制的纳米电极之间排列，以制造多个终端设备。使用这种方法，将展示用于硬件级信息处理的纳米级设备集成。长期目标是将设计的能力扩展到有限状态逻辑机的能力。

We propose to develop prototypical combinational logic machines using electronic quantum states of self-assembled exchange-coupled few nanodot arrays. Small core Au clusters will be functionalized with suitable ligands. Nanoelectrodes will electrically address the states of the array formed by assembling a few dots. Theory will determine the possible states taking into account the Coulomb blocking of charge transfer, the different aspects of disorder and the role of the ligands. The design seeks to go beyond switching arrays and to integrate directly Boolean operations for the implementation of logic gates, such as half- and full-adders, on a few-dot array. We aim to fabricate a demonstrator of such logic gates working at room temperature, to perform electron transport studies, to verify the computational results, and to use theory to further optimize the performance. For this, functional Au clusters with well-defined core-sizes of less than 2 nm will be synthesized. These will be arranged by directed self-assembly processes between lithographically predefined and, in a second stage, tailored nanoelectrodes in order to fabricate multiple terminal devices. Using this approach nanometer scale integration of devices for information processing at the hardware level will be demonstrated. A longer-term goal is to extend the capability of the design to that of a finite state logic machine.