A Family of Single Electron Static Buffered Boolean Logic

Abstract —In this paper we investigate single electron tun-neling (SET) devices from the logic design perspective, usingthe SET tunnel junction’s ability to control the transport ofindividual electrons. More specifically, we focus on the im-plementationofa familyofBooleanSingleElectronEncodedLogic (SEEL) gates, in which the logic values 0 and 1 are en-coded as a net charge of 0 or 1 electron charges. We firstpresent a general scheme for implementing SEEL thresholdgates. Second, we present a static buffer that reduces thefeedback effect encountered in networks of SEEL gates. Wethen propose a family of buffered logic gates of which eachgate consists of a threshold gate derived logic gate combinedwith a static buffer. We demonstrate via simulation that thegates of the proposed logic family operate correctly in a net-work. Keywords —single electron technology, SET, logic circuit,buffered gates I. I NTRODUCTION During the last decades the feature size of MOS basedcircuits has dramatically decreased. Since the seventies themicroelectronics industry has followed Moore’s law, dou-bling processing power every 18 months [6]. The ever de-creasing feature size, and the corresponding increase in thenumber of transistors per mm