Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ECE 550 Nanoelectronic Devices

(A) NanoTransistor: MOSFETs. Advanced MOSFETs—SOI, FinFETs, SiGe, carbon nanotubes and ribbons, nanowires. Quantum devices—RTD, tunnel FET, qubits. Non-charge based devices—spinFET; (B) NanoMemory: DRAM, Flash, Ovonic, Electrolyte, M/F RAM, Spin torque devices; (C) Energy Conversion Devices: Solar cell and DSSC, Quantum dots, SSL; (D) NanoBio Devices: Biosensor, Ion channels.

Credit Hours: 3 Lecture

Prerequisites: ECE 447, ECE 345, or consent of instructor.

Course Coordinator: Shaikh S. Ahmed

Textbooks:

1. “Fundamentals of Modern VLSI Devices”, Y. Taur, T.H. Ning, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

References:

1. “Advanced MOS Devices”, Dieter Schroder, Addison Wesley Longman, November, 1987.

2. “Physics of Semiconductor Devices”, S.M. Sze, Kwok K. Ng, Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2006.

3. “Silicon-on-Insulator Technology: Materials to VLSI”, 2nd Ed., J.P. Colinge, Kluwer, 1997.

Goals:

1. Give a general introduction to different types of conventional and novel nanoelectronic devices for different applications. The target applications are switching, memory, energy conversion/storage, and bionanoelectronics.

2. Understand the underlying physical processes governing the operation of these devices. Understanding of these processes would build on earlier semiconductor device courses, which introduced the student to the basic device concepts.

3. Various figures of merit widely used for efficient device design and performance study will be addressed.

4. Understand various higher order effects (e.g. short channel effects, quantum effects, discrete dopants and process variation) that influence today's nanoscale devices.

5. Various problems/challenges and technological bottlenecks in the realization of nanoelectronic devices with desired and optimum performance will be discussed.

6. Study different novel and exploratory devices and alternative technologies (non-charge based and fully quantum computation and information processing) as means of sustaining the semiconductor industries’ growth in the coming years.

7. Communicate efficiently with the circuit/system designers and the science persons and give them essential feedback from device point of view.

Projects:

1. Students will be using in-house and freely available software tools to study and analyze various aspects of nanoelectronic devices and expected to generate novel design ideas and find solutions to these technological problems.

2. Demonstrate how computer programming (Matlab/Fortran/C/others) can facilitate learning of nanoscale phenomena and device design.

Major CAD Packages:

1. Students will be using in-house (synopsis taurus) and freely available software tools on NSF supported computational infrastructure nanoHUB.org

Last Review: Spring Semester 2009