This paper describes a guiding principle for designing functional single-electron tunneling (SET) circuitsthat is a way to elicit the potential functions of a given SET circuit by using as a guiding tool the SET circuit stability diagram. A stability diagram is a map that depicts the stable regions of a SET circuit based on the circuit's variable coordinates. By scrutinizing the diagram, we can infer all the potential functions that can be obtained from a circuit configuration. As an example, we take up a well-known SET-inverter circuit and uncover its latent functions by studying the circuit configuration, based on its stability diagram. We can produce various functions, e.g., step-inverter, Schmidt-trigger, memory cell, literal, and stochastic-neuron functions. The last function makes good use of the inherent stochastic nature of single-electron tunneling, and can be applied to Boltzmann-machine neural network systems.

This paper proposes an architecture for circuit construction for developing single-electron integrated circuits based on majority logic. The majority logic gate circuit proposed consists of a capacitor array for input summation and a single-electron inverter for threshold operation. It accepts an odd number of inputs and produces the corresponding output on the basis of the principle of majority decision; it produces an output of logic "1" if the majority of the inputs is 1, and an output of "0" if the majority is 0. By combining the proposed majority gate circuits, various subsystems can be constructed with a smaller number of devices than that of Boolean-based construction. An adder and a parity generator are designed as examples. It is shown by computer simulation that the designed subsystems produce the correct logic operations. The operation error induced by thermal agitation is also estimated.

This paper proposes a method of constructing single-electron logic subsystems on the basis of the binary decision diagram (BDD). Sample subsystems, an adder and a comparator, are designed by combining single-electron BDD devices. It is demonstrated by computer simulation that the designed subsystems successfully produce, through pipelined processing, an output data flow in response to the input data flow. The operation error caused by thermal agitation is estimated. An output interface for converting single-electron transport into binary-voltage signals is also designed.

A multiple-valued logic inverter is proposed that uses single-electron-tunneling (SET) circuits in which the discreteness of the electron charge is utilized. The inverter circuit, which is composed of only two SET transistors, has a memory function as well as an inverter function for multiple-valued logic. A quantizing circuit and a D flip-flop circuit for multiple-valued logic can be compactly constructed by combining two inverters. A threshold device can be compactly constructed by attaching more than one input capacitor to the inverter circuit. A quaternary full adder circuit can be constructed by using two threshold devices. Implementation issues are also discussed.

We investigated the effects of chemical treatments for removing native oxide layers on InAlN surfaces by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The untreated surface of the air exposed InAlN layer was covered with the native oxide layer mainly composed of hydroxides. Hydrochloric acid treatment and ammonium hydroxide treatment were not efficient for removing the native oxide layer even after immersion for 15 min, while hydrofluoric acid (HF) treatment led to a removal in a short treatment time of 1 min. After the HF treatment, the surface was prevented from reoxidation in air for 1 h. We also found that the 5-min buffered HF treatment had almost the same effect as the 1-min HF treatment. Finally, an attempt was made to apply the HF-based treatment to the metal-InAlN contact to confirm the XPS results.