1/f noise spectroscopy and noise tailoring of nanoelectronic devices

TL;DR

This paper reviews 1/f noise in nanoelectronic devices, highlighting how noise characteristics depend on device geometry and transport mechanisms, and discusses how noise analysis aids in understanding and tailoring device performance for advanced computing.

Contribution

It provides a system-specific analysis of 1/f noise in nanoelectronic platforms and explores noise tailoring for probabilistic computing hardware.

Findings

Noise depends on device volume, resistance, frequency, and voltage.

1/f noise serves as a fingerprint for transport mechanisms.

Noise tailoring enables new probabilistic computing applications.

Abstract

In this paper, we review the 1/f-type noise properties of nanoelectronic devices focusing on three demonstrative platforms: resistive switching memories, graphene nanogaps and single-molecule nanowires. The functionality of such ultrasmall devices is confined to an extremely small volume, where bulk considerations on the noise loose their validity: the relative contribution of a fluctuator heavily depends on its distance from the device bottleneck, and the noise characteristics are sensitive to the nanometer-scale device geometry and the details of the mostly non-classical transport mechanism. All these are reflected by a highly system-specific dependence of the noise properties on the active device volume (and the related device resitance), the frequency, or the applied voltage. Accordingly, 1/f-type noise measurements serve as a rich fingerprint of the relevant transport and noise-generating mechanisms in the studied nanoelectronic systems. Finally, we demonstrate that not only the fundamental understanding and the targeted noise suppression is fueled by the 1/f-type noise analysis, but novel probabilistic computing hardware platforms heavily seek well tailorable nanoelectric noise sources.