Eliciting the Potential Functions of Single-Electron Circuits

Masamichi AKAZAWA, Yoshihito AMEMIYA

Summary :

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.

• Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics Vol.E80-C No.7 pp.849-858
• Publication Date: 1997/07/25
• Type of Manuscript: Special Section INVITED PAPER (Special Issue on New Concept Device and Novel Architecture LSIs)

Authors

Masamichi AKAZAWA
Yoshihito AMEMIYA

Keyword

single-electron,  SET,  logic,  circuit,  stability diagram,  Boltzmann machine