The Current Status of Nanoelectronic Devices

Abstract

Over the last thirty years, many new physical phenomena have been discovered and suggested for use in data processing devices. Many, but not all, of these devices are described as "nanoelectronic", because one or more of their characteristic dimensions lie in the size range ≈1–100 nm. However, any new idea has a long way to go before it can achieve any practical value. It is necessary to develop and test a series of increasingly complicated structures. Starting from (1) the basic physical effect and its theoretical description, one must design and fabricate prototypes of (2) a single device, then (3) a simple circuit, then (4) functional units such as assemblies of logic gates or blocks of memory cells, and eventually (5) electronic chips. This article provides an overview of the development status of some of these device technologies.