Nanoelectronics

Nanoelectronics is where physics, material science, chemistry and electric engineering inevitably meet.

Semiconductor electronics have seen a sustained exponential decrease in size and cost and a similar increase in performance and level of integration over the last thirty years (known as Moore's Law). The Silicon Roadmap is laid out for the next ten years. After that, either economical or physical barriers will pose a huge challenge. The former is related to the difficulty of making a profit in view of the exorbitant costs of building the necessary manufacturing capabilities if present day technologies are extrapolated. The latter is a direct consequence of the shrinking device size, leading to physical phenomena impeding the operation of current devices. Quantum and coherence effects, high electric fields creating avalanche dielectric breakdowns, heat dissipation problems in closely packed structures as well as the non-uniformity of dopant atoms and the relevance of single atom defects are all roadblocks along the current road of miniaturization [ These phenomena are characteristic for structures a few nanometers in size and, instead of being viewed as an obstacle to future progress might form the basis of post-silicon information processing technologies. It is even far from clear that electrons will be the method of choice for signal processing or computation in the long term - quantum computing, spin electronics, optics or even computing based on (nano-) mechanics are actively being discussed. Nanoelectronics thus needs to be understood as a general field of research aimed at developing an understanding of the phenomena characteristic of nanometer sized objects with the aim of exploiting them for information processing purposes. Specifically, by electronics we mean the handling of complicated electrical wave forms for communicating information (as in cellular phones), probing (as in radar) and data processing (as in computers) concepts at the fundamental research level are being persued world-wide to find nano-solutions to these three characteristic applications of electronics. One can group these concepts into three main categories: