Enhancement of Coulomb blockade and tunability by multidot coupling in a silicon-on-insulator-based single-electron transistor

A dual-gate-controlled single-electron transistor with coupled dot geometry has been fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator structure. Coupled dots are defined by tunable gates which are designed to separately control the tunneling potential barriers to compensate for disorder due to size fluctuation in quantum dots. The Coulomb-blockade phenomena observed in linear and nonlinear transport regimes were found to be enhanced by the multidot coupling. The Coulomb staircase (nonlinear effect) appears more clearly with the increasing number of coupled dots, indicating definite suppression of the inevitable cotunneling process. In the linear regime, the frequency of Coulomb oscillation was able to be tuned by changing the interdot coupling strength. These results indicate that enhancement of the Coulomb blockade and tunability can be achieved through replacing the traditional single dot by gate-controlled multidots in future single-electron devices. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(99)01830-6].