Si single electron tunneling transistor with tunable barriers

We demonstrate the operation of single-electron tunneling (SET) transistor using electrostatically induced barriers. The barriers are formed on a Silicon nanowire using metal-oxide-metal field effect transistor (MOSFET) gates. This allows us to control the conductance of the tunnel barriers by more than 3 orders of magnitude. It also allows for various configurations of charge islands (changing the gate used for the tunnel barrier changes the shape and size of the island ). Below 4 K, the Coulomb blockade oscillations obtained are highly periodic. We also report the excellent reproducibility of the value of gate capacitances between different devices (variation of about 1 aF). The excellent controllability in these devices increases their potential in a number of applications, like metrological current standard or multivalued memory.