Guest Editors' Introduction

This special issue of Nanotechnology, consisting of papers presented at the 1998 IEEE Silicon Nanoelectronics Workshop, deals with promising silicon-based nanotechnologies, devices and architecture paradigms that may ultimately replace conventional CMOS, as well as the question of when this technology shift might occur. Nanostructure technology has only relatively recently begun to merge with silicon technology. Quantum transport and other mesoscopic phenomena have traditionally been investigated in other materials systems. The ease of fabrication of metal films (in studies of the Aharonov-Bohm effect) and the relatively high mobility and band offsets afforded by III-V materials (utilized in investigating quantum transport in modulation-doped structures) have led to the fact that mostly materials other than silicon have been utilized to study phenomena on the nanoscale. One could argue that nanoscale inversion layers in MOS devices preceded laterally nanofabricated features by decades, but the long phase coherence lengths available at low temperatures in III-V heterostructures helped III-V materials catch the attention of nanotechnologists. However, the existence of a near perfect native oxide gives silicon a great advantage over other materials in terms of its acceptance into the nanostructures community. Silicon dioxide offers several possibilities including embedded nanocrystals in the gate dielectric, devices built on buried oxide layers, oxidation of nanostructures to modify their properties, the possibility of very high tunnelling barriers and likely many others not yet discovered.