Nanoelectronics in Oxides and Semiconductors

The success of silicon industry lies on three major properties of silicon, an easily formed oxide layer to allow field effect operation, tunability of carrier density and high device scalability. All these features exist in oxides, together with some novel properties such as ferroelectricity, magnetic effects and metal-insulator transition. With the recent development in material growth method including molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD) and reflection high energy electron diffraction (REED), atomically engineered oxide interfaces become available, thus opening the door to the novel oxide nanoelectronics. In this dissertation we create and study nanoelectronics in oxides, semiconductors and hybrid of these two. We used a conductive atomic force microscope tip to write single electron transistors in the 3-unit-cell-LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructure and observed ferroelectric tunneling behaviors. We also fabricated ferroelectric field transistors directly on silicon using strained SrTiO3 ferroelectric film and further confirmed the ferroelectric properties of this device. Meanwhile, we developed an ultrasensitive microwave capacitance sensor to study the electronic properties of self-assembled quantum dots and the switching mechanism of memristive devices. The integration of this sensor to a home made atomic force microscope provides an important tool to study the dielectric properties at nanoscale