Design of computationally useful single-electron digital circuits

We formulate and discuss principles for designing computationally useful networks of Coulomb‐blockade devices. Our particular focus is on locally interconnected synchronous networks in which the numerical discreteness of a computation is represented directly by the quantization of electron charge, i.e., electrons represent bits. To highlight our emphasis on circuits and architectural issues, and on performing locally interconnected computation rather than traditional logic as has been the interest heretofore (single‐electron logic), we refer to our networks as single‐electron digital circuits (SEDCs). In addition to being single‐electron and locally interconnected, the SEDCs we propose have a regular ‘‘cellular’’ structure with occupancy‐independent biasings and with electron‐electron interactions carefully controlled. The chief virtue of SEDCs is their scalability, both as devices (because of their Coulomb blockade basis) and as circuits (because of their local interconnectivity), perhaps even to molecul...

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