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Abstract
The nanoscale silicon electronic devices are the fundamental building blocks for the modern integrated circuitry that powers the personal computer, smart phone, advanced car sensor or biomedical implant. Besides these great contributions to our daily life, they also provide excellent host enviroment for the physics experiments, in which the properties of individual charge or spin can be investigated. In this thesis, we investigated silicon nanoelectronic devices that have important applications in the field of quantum electrical current metrology and quantum information processing.
First, we implmeneted an extremely accurate gigahertz silicon-based single-electron(SE) pump for the redefinition of the International Standard unit for the electrical current, Ampere. This device can reconstruct macroscopic measurable dc current by transfer individual electrons in pace with an exeternal drive signal. In a measurement with tracebility back to the primary voltage and resistance standards, we found the device current closely matched the target value within a total uncertainty of about 0.3 parts-per-million. Up to date, this is the most accurate electrical measurement ever performed on the current of a silicon device. In addition, through the theoretical analysis the current plateau, we estimate the upperbound of the dominate thermal error of our pump could be as low as 4 parts-per-billion. This implies our device could have already satisfied the stringent accuracy criteria of the redefinition of Ampere.
Next, we choose to assess the accuracy of our pump in parts-per-billion regime through the error-counting approach. We revise the fabrication recipe for the Al single-electron-transitor~(SET) that can be used as on-chip integrated error counter for the SE pumps. Through both the room-temperature probing test as well as millikelvin temperature measurement, we found the revision significantly improved the yield and the quality of the sensor. We also successfully fabricated the pump-sensor integrated devices. In a preliminary study, we observed a large amplitude fluctuation in the sensor reading once the reservoir dot is induced. We hypothesize this is caused by the free-movement of electrons in the micron-size dot and call for future study to confirm this theory.
Finally, we developed a Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) compatible process to create a Schottky-barrier MOS Field-Effect-Transistor (SBMOSFET) for the signal amplification of silicon quantum electronic devices at cryogenic temperature. We found the SBMOSFET operated as a p-MOS tunnel-FET at low temperature. Based on the electric field calculated through the commercial software TCAD, we successfully replicated the current profile of SBMOSFET that is in good agreement with the cryogenic measurement result.