Room-temperature single-electron memory

This paper presents room-temperature operation, for the first time, of single-electron memory, in which one electron represents one bit of information. This is made possible by our new one-transistor memory configuration which has a very high charge sensitivity (conventionally, three circuit elements are needed). Another new technique, which facilitates single-electron memory, is the ultra-thin (3.4 nm) poly-Si film used for the active region, in which sub-10-nm-width current channels and storage dots are naturally formed. In the fabricated poly-Si TFT's a single electron is stored (or “written”) on a low-energy silicon island, and the number of stored electrons is counted (or “read”) by the quantized threshold-voltage shift. Single-electron memory provides the potential for new nonvolatile RAM's, suitable for mobile computers/communicators