Static buffered SET based logic gates

Abstract

In this paper we investigate single electron tunneling (SET) devices from the logic design perspective, using the SET tunnel junction's ability to control the transport of individual electrons. In SET technology, small circuits containing only 1 tunnel junction (passive circuits) can form compact circuits implementing complex functions, but suffer from strong feedback effects. To alleviate this problem a dynamic buffer was proposed. However, this dynamic buffer has a behavior similar to a flip-flop and requires additional control signals. Therefore we first propose in this paper a static SET active buffer. The proposed static buffer switches output values by transporting one electron only and operates on a DC supply voltage. Second, we combine the proposed buffer with a threshold gate and derive static buffered NAND and NOR gates. We demonstrate our approach by presenting simulation results for a small network of gates, proving that the gates function correctly under a fanout of 4.