Nano Electronics: A New Era of Devices

The technical and economic growth of the twentieth century was marked by evolution of electronic devices and gadgets. The day-to-day lifestyle has been significantly affected by the advancement in communication systems, information systems and consumer electronics. The lifeline of progress has been the invention of the transistor and its dynamic up-gradation. Discovery of fabricating Integrated Circuits (IC’s) revolutionized the concept of electronic circuits. With advent of time the size of components decreased, which led to increase in component density. This trend of decreasing device size and denser integrated circuits is being limited by the current lithography techniques. Non-uniformity of doping, quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons from source to drain and leakage of electrons through gate oxide limit scaling down of devices. Heat dissipation and capacitive coupling between circuit components becomes significant with decreasing size of the components. Along with the intrinsic technical limitations, downscaling of devices to nanometer sizes leads to a change in the physical mechanisms controlling the charge propagation. To deal with this constraint, the search is on to look around for alternative materials for electronic device application and new methods for electronic device fabrication. Such material is comprised of organic molecules, proteins, carbon materials, DNA and the list is endless which can be grown in the laboratory. Many molecules show interesting electronic properties, which make them probable candidates for electronic device applications. The challenge is to interpret their electronic properties at nanoscale so as to exploit them for use in new generation electronic devices. Need to trim downsize and have a higher component density have ushered us into an era of nanoelectronics.