SET/CMOS universal literal gate - based analog-to-digital converter

In this paper, we propose an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) using a hybrid single-electron-transistor/complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (SET/CMOS) universal literal gate based on the Coulomb oscillation phenomenon of a SET. The SET/CMOS universal literal gate consists of the SET/resistor inverter and the CMOS inverter, whose input is connected to the output of SET/resistor inverter. Because the CMOS inverter has the high input impedance and the low output impedance, the proposed circuit makes it possible to overcome the disadvantage of the high output impedance of a SET/resistor inverter by connecting its output to any input of CMOS circuit. The circuit has shown high immunity on temperature and can eliminate the background charge effect as applied to ADC. Using SPICE macromodel of SET at 30 K, we demonstrated the performance of a 4-bit ADC, composed of SET/CMOS universal literal gate and capacitive divider. These results can be simply extended to multi-bit ADC.