Static buffered SET based logic gates

In this paper we investigate single electron tunneling (SET) devices from the logic design perspective, using the SET tunnel junction´s ability to control the transport of individual electrons. In SET technology, small circuits containing only 1 tunnel junction (passive circuits) can form compact circuits implementing complex functions, but suffer from strong feedback effects. To alleviate this problem a dynamic buffer was proposed. However, this dynamic buffer has a behavior similar to a flip-flop and requires additional control signals. Therefore we first propose in this paper a static SET active buffer. The proposed static buffer switches output values by transporting one electron only and operates on a DC supply voltage. Second, we combine the proposed buffer with a threshold gate and derive static buffered NAND and NOR gates. We demonstrate our approach by presenting simulation results for a small network of gates, proving that the gates function correctly under a fanout of 4.