ABSTRACT
Silicon-based semiconductor industry has been very successful in the past decades, and has led us to the information age. According to Moore’s law, the semiconductor device density in a chip has to be doubled every one-and-half year [1]. To date, the semiconductor devices have been miniaturized to sub-50 nm dimensions, where several factors limit the bit density increase, including lithography resolution, electromigration, and capacitance. With the onslaught of the digital age, the demands of ultrahigh data density have fueled the need for information memory media with sub10 nm scale that falls to the dimensions of a single molecule [2,3]. However, there are some crucial effects emerging from such low-dimension devices: (1) when too few atoms are used in a wire, the nanostructure moves in response to currents; (2) when too few electrons are used in a nanoscale device, the fluctuation in their number becomes significant in the device performance; and (3) the electron noise in a nanoscale world may come from thermodynamic fluctuations, defect scattering, and finite-size statistics.
