Error mechanisms and rates in tunable-barrier single-electron turnstiles and charge-coupled devices

Si-based single-electron tunneling (SET) devices have of late become an important alternative to the metal-based ones, both for ultralarge scale integration (ULSI) electronics and for electrical metrology. We have very recently been designing, fabricating, and measuring SET turnstiles, pumps, and charge-coupled devices using tunable barriers in silicon. Having shown the potential of these devices, we wish to understand the error mechanisms which may manifest themselves, and to predict the level of these errors, in order to decide how feasible these devices will be. In this paper, we devote a substantial amount of analysis to the consideration of the dynamical error mechanism. This particular error considers how electrons split up as the barrier is raised, or alternatively how the Coulomb blockade is formed. We then consider a wide variety of other errors, including thermal, frequency, leakage, and heating errors. We show the dependence of the error rate on each of those mechanisms, and predict maxima or minima for the corresponding parameters. In the conclusion, we discuss the various advantages Si-based turnstiles or pumps would offer with respect to the metal-based ones. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.