Single-Electron-Based Flexible Multivalued Exclusive-or Logic Gate

By using two symmetrical sidewall gates, we implemented a Si-based single-electron exclusive- OR (XOR) gate and reported on the first flexible multivalued (MV) functionality. A grayscale contour plot of the output voltages displays alternating high/low values as a function of two single-electron transistor (SET) input voltages. Their voltage transfer characteristics display typical XOR or XNOR gate function depending on input voltages for binary, MV, and binary-MV mixed-modes. This flexible two-input XOR gate, combined with the previously reported NAND/NOR gates, provide three basic arithmetic blocks for the SET-based MV logic gate family.