Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

A recent breakthrough enabled us to show the first true demonstration that SET (Single Electron Transistor) can operate under normal electronic circuit conditions and even at temperatures exceeding 130C. Indeed, this type of device must normally be cooled at temperatures much below the normal operation temperatures of a standard microelectronic circuit in order to benefit from its unique nano-scale properties, which include extremely low energy consumption and a large capacity of integration. We propose to combined a SET carried out by our approach with a small nanostructure island in order to produce a non-volatile memory device with an access time as fast as the random access memory that we find in today's computers. The fabrication of such a device, able to operate without the need for cryogenic infrastructure, has the potential to revolutionize the memory market, as much for USB key type memories as for memory cards for digital cameras and MP3 music players. Another potential major repercussion is the unification of the random access memory chips used in computers and magnetic hard disks which store information with a great capacity: the result would be a single non-volatile memory chip (which is not erased when the supply is cut off) of very large total capacity, functioning without any compromise on reading and writing access speed. This project aims at the fabrication of a working single electron memory prototype.