A Silicon Cluster Based Single Electron Transistor with Potential Room-Temperature Switching

We demonstrate the fabrication of a single electron transistor device based on a single ultra-small silicon quantum dot connected to a gold break junction with a nanometer scale separation. The gold break junction is created through a controllable electromigration process and the individual silicon quantum dot in the junction is deter- mined to be a Si 170 cluster. Differential conductance as a function of the bias and gate voltage clearly shows the Coulomb diamond which confirms that the transport is dominated by a single silicon quantum dot. It is found that the charging energy can be as large as 300meV, which is a result of the large capacitance of a small silicon quantum dot （-1.8 nm）. This large Coulomb interaction can potentially enable a single electron transistor to work at room temperature. The level spacing of the excited state can be as large as 10meV, which enables us to manipulate individual spin via an external magnetic field. The resulting Zeeman splitting is measured and the g factor of 2.3 is obtained, suggesting relatively weak electron-electron interaction in the silicon quantum dot which is beneficial for spin coherence time.

Minimization of Switching Devices and Driver Circuits in Multilevel Inverter

The various configurations of multilevel inverter involve the use of more numbers of switching devices, energy storage devices and/or unidirectional devices. Each switching unit necessitates the add-on driver circuit for proper functionality. Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter requires overlapped switching pulses for the switching devices in positive and negative arms of the bridge which may lead to short circuit during the device failure. This work addresses the problems in different configurations of multilevel inverter by using reduced number of switching and energy storage devices and driver circuits. In the present approach Single Switch is used for each stair case positive output and single H-Bridge for phase reversal. Driver circuits are reduced by using the property of body diode of the MOSFET. Switching pulses are generated by Arduino Development Board. The circuit is simulated using Matlab. More so, through experimental means, it is physically tested and results are analyzed for the 5-step inverter and thereby simulation is fully validated. Consequently, cycloconverter operation of the circuit is simulated using Matlab. Moreover, half bridge configuration of the multilevel inverter is also analyzed for high frequency induction heating applications.