Many semiconductor quantum devices utilize a novel tunneling transport mechanism that allows picosecond device switching speeds. The negative differential resistance characteristic of these devices, achieved due to resonant tunneling, is also ideally suited for the design of highly compact, self-latching logic circuits. As a result, quantum device technology is a promising emerging alternative for high-performance very-large-scale-integration design. The bistable nature of the basic logic gates implemented using resonant tunneling devices has been utilized in the development of a gate-level pipelining technique, called nanopipelining, that significantly improves the throughput and speed of pipelined systems. The advent of multiple-peak resonant tunneling diodes provides a viable means for efficient design of multiple-valued circuits with decreased interconnect complexity and reduced device count as compared to multiple-valued circuits in conventional technologies. This paper details various circuit design accomplishments in the area of binary and multiple-valued logic using resonant tunneling diodes (RTD's) in conjunction with high-performance III-V devices such as heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT's) and modulation doped field-effect transistors (MODFET's). New bistable logic families using RTD+HBT and RTD+MODFET gates are described that provide a single-gate, self-latching majority function in addition to basic NAND, NOR, and inverter gates.

The resonant tunneling diode (RTD) has been widely studied because of its importance in the field of nanoelectronic science and technology and its potential applications in very high speed/functionality devices and circuits. Even though much progress has been made in this regard, additional work is needed to realize the full potential of RTD's. As research on RTD's continues, we will try in this tutorial review to provide the reader with an overall and succinct picture of where we stand in this exciting field or research and to address the following questions: What makes RTD's so attractive? To what extent can RTD's be modeled for design purposes? What are the required and achievable device properties in terms of digital logic applications? To address these issues, we review the device operational principles, various modeling approaches, and major device properties. Comparisons among the various RTD physical models and major features of RTD's, resonant interband tunneling diodes, and Esaki tunnel diodes are presented. The tutorial and analysis provided in this paper may help the reader in becoming familiar with current research efforts, as well as to examine the important aspects in further RTD developments and their circuit applications.

Quantum electronic devices such as resonant tunneling diodes and transistors are now beginning to be used in ultrafast and compact circuit designs. These devices exhibit negative differential resistance (NDR) and/or negative transconductance in their I-V characteristics and have active dimensions of a few nanometers. Since the conventional drift-diffusion approximation is not valid for simulation of device behavior at this microscopic scale, quantum simulation models based on the Schrodinger equation are required to accurately predict the behavior of the device. However, these models are too slow for circuit simulation. This paper describes a modeling scheme that maintains the accuracy of the quantum simulation while achieving satisfactory speed for circuit simulation, and is applicable to a wide range of two and three terminal resonant tunneling devices and may also be extended to future scaled-down MOS and bipolar devices. A self-consistent solution of the Poisson and the Schrodinger equations for various bias points is used to build up tables of conductances, capacitances and other parameters. Table-lookup methods are then used during circuit simulation. Convergence techniques have been developed to overcome the problems caused by the NDR characteristics and the lookup-table model in simulation. While implementation details are presented for a resonant tunneling transistor (RTT), models for several other quantum electronic devices have also been implemented in NDR-SPICE.>