Advanced Room Temperature Single-Electron Transistor of a Germanium Nanochain with Two and Multitunnel Junctions

The single-electron transistor (SET) has tremendous importance in the microelectronic industry on account of low-power consumption, an ultrasmall size, and a large integration prospect. The key challenge is to resolve the fabrication issues of a SET to realize a mechanically steady device with reproducible and controllable transport characteristics that operate at room temperature. Herein, we report on the realization of robust and well-controlled SET devices with at least two junctions and multijunctions using an advanced nanochain (NC) architecture of germanium nanoparticles rooted by a germanium oxide ropeway. These two-junction and multitunneling-junction (MTJ) SET devices exhibit an ideal Coulomb staircase behavior of single-electron charge transfer at room temperature and obeyed the theoretical path of increasing threshold voltage with the number of tunnel junctions. This Coulomb transistor prospects magnificent rewards of room-temperature operation, periodic Coulomb oscillations, well-controlled threshold voltage and large on/off ratios and have the potential to modernize the random access memory and digital data storage technologies.