NANOWIRES AND NANOTUBES

NANOTECHNOLOGY(NANOTUBES AND NANOWIRES) Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This covers both current work and concepts that are more advanced. In its original sense, 'nanotechnology' refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, high performance products. The field of nanotubes and nanowires is evolving at a rapid pace, with many potential applications in electronics, optics, and sensors, to name a few. In this book, various prominent researchers summarize our current understanding of these new materials systems, as well as some of these potential applications.

NANOTUBES AND NANOWIRES

Carbon nanotubes have remarkable electronic, mechanical, and chemical properties. Depending on their specific diameter and the bonding arrangement of their carbon atoms, nanotubes exhibit either metallic or semiconducting behaviour. Electrical conduction within a perfect nanotube is ballistic (negligible scattering), with low thermal dissipation. As a result, a wire made from a nanotube, or a nanowire, can carry much more current than an ordinary metal wire of comparable size. At 1.4 nanometres in diameter, nanotubes are about a hundred times smaller than the gate width of silicon semiconductor devices. In addition to nanowires for conduction, transistors, diodes, and simple logic circuits have been demonstrated by combining metallic and semiconductor carbon nanotubes. Similarly, silicon nanowires have been used to build experimental devices, such as field-effect transistors, bipolar transistors, inverters, light-emitting diodes, sensors, and even simple memory. A major challenge for nanowire circuits, as for molecular electronics, is connecting and integrating these devices into a workable high-density architecture. Ideally, the structure would be grown and assembled in place. Crossbar architectures that combine the function of wires and devices are of particular interest.

SINGLE-ELECTRON TRANSISTORS
At nanoscale dimensions the energy required to add one additional electron to a small island (isolated physical region)for example, through a tunneling barrierbecomes significant. This change in energy provides the basis for devising single-electron transistors. At low temperatures, where thermal fluctuations are small, various single-electron-device nanostructures are readily
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achievable, and extensive research has been carried out for structures with confined electron flow. However, room-temperature applications will require that sizes be reduced significantly, to the one-nanometre range, to achieve stable operation. For large-scale application with millions of devices, as found in current integrated circuits, the need for structures with very uniform size to maintain uniform device characteristics presents a significant challenge. Also, in this and many new nanodevices being explored, the lack of gain is a serious drawback limiting implementation in large-scale electronic circuits. SPINTRONICS Spintronics refers to electronic devices that perform logic operations based on not just the electrical charge of carriers but also their spin. For example, information could be transported or stored through the spin-up or spin-down states of electrons. This is a new area of research, and issues include the injection of spin-polarized carriers, their transport, and their detection. The role of nanoscale structure and electronic properties of the ferromagnetic-semiconductor interface on the spin injection process, the growth of new ferromagnetic semiconductors with nanoscale control, and the possible use of nanostructured features to manipulate spin are all of interest.

INFORMATION STORAGE
Current approaches to information storage and retrieval include high-density, high-speed, solidstate electronic memories, as well as slower (but generally more spacious) magnetic and optical discs (see computer memory). As the minimum feature size for electronic processing approaches 100 nanometres, nanotechnology provides ways to decrease further the bit size of the stored information, thus increasing density and reducing interconnection distances for obtaining stillhigher speeds. For example, the basis of the current generation of magnetic disks is the giant magnetoresistance effect. A magnetic read/write head stores bits of information by setting the direction of the magnetic field in nanometre-thick metallic layers that alternate between ferromagnetic and nonferromagnetic. Differences in spin-dependent scattering of electrons at the interface layers lead to resistance differences that can be read by the magnetic head. Mechanical properties, particularly tribology (friction and wear of moving surfaces), also play an important role in magnetic hard disk drives, since magnetic heads float only about 10 nanometres above spinning magnetic disks.

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Another approach to information storage that is dependent on designing nanometre-thick magnetic layers is under commercial development. Known as magnetic random access memory (MRAM), a line of electrically switchable magnetic material is separated from a permanently magnetized layer by a nanoscale nonmagnetic interlayer. A resistance change that depends on the relative alignment of the fields is read electrically from a large array of wires through cross lines. MRAM will require a relatively small evolution from conventional semiconductor manufacturing, and it has the added benefit of producing nonvolatile memory (no power or batteries are needed to maintain stored memory states). Still at an exploratory stage, studies of electrical conduction through molecules have generated interest in their possible use as memory. While still very speculative, molecular and nanowire approaches to memory are intriguing because of the small volume in which the bits of memory are stored and the effectiveness with which biological systems store large amounts of information.

BY HARSHIT LAL DEPT. OF EEE USN-INH10EE725

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