A superconducting resonant tunneling transistor with insulating base layer

A superconducting transistor that uses resonant tunneling as the carrier transport mechanism is proposed. Carriers travel between two superconducting electrodes by resonant tunneling via impurity levels in a barrier. The barrier is a high-dielectric-constant insulator layer sandwiched between low-dielectric-constant layers. The high-dielectric-constant layer conducts an electric field, and the electric potential in the barrier is controlled by voltage applied to the base electrode connected to the edge of the high-dielectric-constant layer. The coupling coefficient between the base and levels may be more than 90% on the average when the emitter stripe width is about 0.1 μm and the relative dielectric constant of the high-dielectric-constant layer is on the order of 10⁴. The current-versus-voltage characteristics of the transistor were calculated using a tunnel Hamiltonian approximation. The transistor´s calculated transconductance was 6×10⁶ S/cm² at a current density of 3×10⁴ A/cm² when the lifetime broadening of resonant levels was 4 meV and the level density was 10¹¹ cm ^-2