edited david ferry john barker (1 risultati)

HardBack. Condizione: Good. No Jacket. xii, 590pp. ill. Good clean copy.NATO ASI Series B: Physics Vol. 251.The technological means now exists for approaching the fundamentallimiting scales of solid state electronics in which a single carrier can, in principle, represent a single bit in an information flow. In this light, the prospect of chemically, or biologically, engineered molccularscale structures which might support information processing functions has enticed workers for many years. The one common factor in all suggested molecular switches, ranging from the experimentally feasible protontunneling structure, to natural systems such as the microtubule, is that each proposed structure deals with individual information carrying entities. Whereas this future molecular electronics faces enormous technical challenges, the same Iimit is already appearing in existing semiconducting quantum wires and small tunneling structures, both superconducting and normal meta devices, in which the motion of a single eh arge through the tunneling barrier can produce a sufficient voltage change to cutoff further tunneling current. We may compare the above situation with todays Si microelectronics, where each bit is encoded as a very arge number, not necessarily fixed, of electrons within acharge pulse. The associated reservoirs and sinks of charge carriers may be profitably tapped and manipulated to proviele macrocurrents which can be readily amplified or curtailed. On the other band, modern semiconductor ULSI has progressed by adopting a linear scaling principle to the downsizing of individual semiconductor devices.