Room-temperature single-electron tunneling in highly-doped silicon-on-insulator nanoscale field-effect transistors

Abstract From the viewpoint of high- (room-) temperature operation of donor-based single-electron transistors, we make a comparative study of nano-scale silicon-on-insulator transistors with phosphorus-doped channels for two dopant-concentration regimes: N D ≈ 1 × 10 18 and 2 × 10 20 cm −3 . We experimentally show that the high- N D devices can provide room-temperature single-electron tunneling operation owing to a large tunnel-barrier height, while operation temperature is limited to about 100 K for the low- N D devices. Numerical simulations of random donor-atom distributions indicate that donor clustering plays a dominant role in the formation of quantum dots, and suggests that clusters comprising of more-than-three donors are responsible for room-temperature operation.