ABSTRACT
Silicon technology continues to progress rapidly, with current generation technologies having physical gate lengths well below 100 nm. At the same time, remarkable advances in nonsilicon nano-and molecular technologies are occurring. It is time to think seriously about the role that nanoelectronics and nontraditional technologies could play in future electronic systems. Moore’s law describes device scaling-down in integrated circuits, which has led an unprecedented growth of the semiconductor industry. At the same time, it also carried device researchers into the nano world. Well-established concepts from mesoscopic physics [1] are now entering the working knowledge of device physicists and engineers as silicon transistors enter the nanoscale [2]. At the micrometer scale, transistors were well described by drift-diffusion equations, but now people are beginning to use a new language to describe nanoscale transistors. In addition, several interesting new devices that may have important applications are also being developed [3-6].
