The engineering of advanced semiconductor heterostructure materials and devices requires a detailed understanding of, and control over, the structure and properties of semiconductor materials and devices at the atomic to nanometer scale. Cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy has emerged as a unique and powerful method to characterize structural morphology and electronic properties in semiconductor epitaxial layers and device structures at these length scales. The basic experimental techniques in cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy are described, and some representative applications to semiconductor heterostructure characterization drawn from recent investigations in the authors laboratory are discussed. Specifically, they describe some recent studies of InP/InAsP and InAsP/InAsSb heterostructures in which nanoscale compositional clustering has been observed and analyzed.

In the last couple of decades, high-performance electronic and optoelectronic devices based on semiconductor heterostructures have been required to obtain increasingly strict and well-defined performances, needing a detailed control, at the atomic level, of the structural composition of the buried interfaces. This goal has been achieved by an improvement of the epitaxial growth techniques and by the parallel use of increasingly sophisticated characterization techniques and of refined theoretical models based on ab initio approaches. This book deals with description of both characterization techniques and theoretical models needed to understand and predict the structural and electronic properties of semiconductor heterostructures and nanostructures. - Comprehensive collection of the most powerful characterization techniques for semiconductor heterostructures and nanostructures - Most of the chapters are authored by scientists that are among the top 10 worldwide in publication ranking of the specific field - Each chapter starts with a didactic introduction on the technique - The second part of each chapter deals with a selection of top examples highlighting the power of the specific technique to analyze the properties of semiconductors

Characterization of Semiconductor Heterostructures and Nanostructures is structured so that each chapter is devoted to a specific characterization technique used in the understanding of the properties (structural, physical, chemical, electrical etc..) of semiconductor quantum wells and superlattices. An additional chapter is devoted to ab initio modeling. The book has two basic aims. The first is educational, providing the basic concepts of each of the selected techniques with an approach understandable by advanced students in Physics, Chemistry, Material Science, Engineering, Nanotechnology. The second aim is to provide a selected set of examples from the recent literature of the TOP results obtained with the specific technique in understanding the properties of semiconductor heterostructures and nanostructures. Each chapter has this double structure: the first part devoted to explain the basic concepts, and the second to the discussion of the most peculiar and innovative examples. The topic of quantum wells, wires and dots should be seen as a pretext of applying top level characterization techniques in understanding the structural, electronic etc properties of matter at the nanometer (and even sub-nanometer) scale. In this respect it is an essential reference in the much broader, and extremely hot, field of Nanotechnology. Comprehensive collection of the most powerful characterization techniques for semiconductors heterostructures and nanostructures Most of the chapters are authored by scientists that are world-wide among the top-ten in publication ranking of the specific field Each chapter starts with a didactic introduction on the technique The second part of each chapters deals with a selection of top examples highlighting the power of the specific technique to analyse the properties of semiconductors heterostructures and nanostructures

This book explores emerging topics in atomic- and nano-scale electronics after the era of Moore’s Law, covering both the physical principles behind, and technological implementations for many devices that are now expected to become key elements of the future of nanoelectronics beyond traditional complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS). Moore’s law is not a physical law itself, but rather a visionary prediction that has worked well for more than 50 years but is rapidly coming to its end as the gate length of CMOS transistors approaches the length-scale of only a few atoms. Thus, the key question here is: “What is the future for nanoelectronics beyond CMOS?” The possible answers are found in this book. Introducing novel quantum devices such as atomic–scale electronic devices, ballistic devices, memristors, superconducting devices, this book also presents the reader with the physical principles underlying new ways of computing, as well as their practical implementation. Topics such as quantum computing, neuromorphic computing are highlighted here as some of the most promising candidates for ushering in a new era of atomic-scale electronics beyond CMOS.