Nanoscale Device Technology presents an overview of how the electronic components that drive all modern technology have changed since their invention in the nineteenth century. It takes readers through the historical development of electronics, from the discovery of a vacuum tube as an electron device to future candidates for logic and memory applications.

The book first explains how electronics developed as an independent subject after it originated from electricity. It next covers the emergence of solid-state electronic devices, including field-effect transistors (FETs), as well as logic circuits and electronic memories. It then discusses the international efforts to manufacture smaller devices in chip design to reduce costs and improve performance.

The book goes on to examine the improvements in lithography and alternate methods of carving smaller devices in the top-down process. It also explains how to avoid performance degradation in small metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), presents alternatives to MOSFET that can be used for MOSFET-like performance in very small devices aimed at later-stage solutions to the scaling issue, and describes structures with diode- or transistor-like switching behavior exhibited by single molecules. The book concludes with an introduction to tools, such as optical tweezers, for transporting extremely small particles or molecules.

Due to nanotechnology, microchips containing semiconductor components are poised to undergo a major transformation in the near future. Nanoscale Device Technology explores how this innovation will have a major impact on the electronics we use daily.

K.K. Saini is chief scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, India. Dr. Saini is editor in chief of Essence Journal; a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Vacuum Society, and the VLSI Society of India; and a life member of the Material Research Society of India, the Metrology Society of India, and the Electron Microscopy Society of India. His research focuses on the development of photocatalytic materials for environmental remediation and clean energy, titanium oxide-based resistive switching devices, and thermoswitching and high-quality functional thin films on large-area substrates by the sol-gel dip process.