Stochastic Coulomb blockade in coupled asymmetric silicon dots formed by pattern-dependent oxidation

This paper reports the observation of stochastic Coulomb blockade for the coupled silicon dots. The device was fabricated from the highly doped dual recess structured silicon channel by means of stress induced pattern-dependent oxidation. Sparsely placed Coulomb oscillation characteristics were observed from the transport characteristics at a low temperature and these irregularities decreased linearly as temperature increased. These characteristics were interpreted as the stochastic Coulomb blockade effect, which occurs due to the mismatch between individual dots in the energy spectrum ladder of the serially connected dots.