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Electronics using hybrid-molecular and mono-molecular devices

Nature volume 408, pages 541–548 (2000)Cite this article

Abstract

The semiconductor industry has seen a remarkable miniaturization trend, driven by many scientific and technological innovations. But if this trend is to continue, and provide ever faster and cheaper computers, the size of microelectronic circuit components will soon need to reach the scale of atoms or molecules—a goal that will require conceptually new device structures. The idea that a few molecules, or even a single molecule, could be embedded between electrodes and perform the basic functions of digital electronics—rectification, amplification and storage—was first put forward in the mid-1970s. The concept is now realized for individual components, but the economic fabrication of complete circuits at the molecular level remains challenging because of the difficulty of connecting molecules to one another. A possible solution to this problem is ‘mono-molecular’ electronics, in which a single molecule will integrate the elementary functions and interconnections required for computation.

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Figure 1: The molecules described in the text.
Figure 2: The first two active three-terminal devices in molecular electronics.
Figure 3: Regimes of electronic transport as a function of the wire width δ and length L. λF is the de Broglie carrier wavelength in the contact electrodes (away from the constriction), λe the elastic mean free path in the wire and λinel the inelastic mean free path in the wire.
Figure 4: Representative example design of a hybrid molecular electronic device.
Figure 6: Illustration of the superposition rule operating in a pure tunnelling regime for a simple intramolecular circuit.
Figure 5: Variation of the inter-electrode distance of planar nanojunctions and the length of the synthesized molecular wires as a function of time.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the CEMES Molecular Electronics group and IBM Zurich's Science and Technology department for helpful discussions. This work has partially been supported through the European Union and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science by the Information Society Technologies–Future Emerging Technology (IST–FET) project Bottom Up Nanomachines.

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  1. Centre d’Elaboration de Matériaux et d’Etudes Structurales–Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique , 29 rue J. Marvig, Toulouse Cedex, 31055, France

    C. Joachim

  2. IBM Research, Zurich Research Laboratory , Rüschlikon, 8803, Switzerland

    J. K. Gimzewski

  3. IBM Research, T. J. Watson Research Center, Route 134, Yorktown Heights, 10598, New York, USA

    A. Aviram

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Joachim, C., Gimzewski, J. & Aviram, A. Electronics using hybrid-molecular and mono-molecular devices. Nature 408, 541–548 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35046000

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