Abstract
Electronic and photonic information technology and renewable energy
alternatives, such as solar energy, fuel cells and batteries, have now reached an
advanced stage in their development. Cost-effective improvements to current
technological approaches have made great progress, but certain challenges
remain. As feature sizes of the latest generations of electronic devices are
approaching atomic dimensions, circuit speeds are now being limited by
interconnect bottlenecks. This has prompted innovations such as the introduction
of new materials into microelectronics manufacturing at an unprecedented rate
and alternative technologies to silicon CMOS architectures. Despite the
environmental impact of conventional fossil fuel consumption, the low cost of
these energy sources has been a long-standing economic barrier to the
development of alternative and more efficient renewable energy sources, fuel cells
and batteries. In the face of mounting environmental concerns, interest in such
alternative energy sources has grown. It is now widely accepted that
nanotechnology offers potential solutions for securing future progress in
information and energy technologies.
The Canadian Semiconductor Technology Conference (CSTC) forum was
established 25 years ago in Ottawa as an important symbol of the intrinsic
strength of the Canadian semiconductor research and development community,
and the Canadian semiconductor industry as a whole. In 2007, the 13th CSTC
was held in Montreal, moving for the first time outside the national capital region.
The first three meetings in the series of ‘Nano and Giga Challenges in Electronics
and Photonics’— NGCM2002 in Moscow, NGCM2004 in Krakow, and
NGC2007 in Phoenix— were focused on interdisciplinary research from the
fundamentals of materials science to the development of new system
architectures. In 2009 NGC2009 and the 14th Canadian Semiconductor
Technology Conference (CSTC2009) were held as a joint event, hosted by
McMaster University (10–14 August, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) and the scope
was expanded to include renewable energy research and development.
This special issue of Nanotechnology is devoted to a better understanding of
the function and design of semiconductor devices that are relevant to information
technology (both electronics and photonics based) and renewable energy
applications. The papers contained in this special issue are selected from the
NGC/CSTC2009 symposium. Among them is a report by Ray LaPierre from
McMaster University and colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Canada on
the ability to manipulate single spins in nanowire quantum bits. The paper also
reports the development of a testbed of a few qubits for general quantum
information processing tasks [1]. Lower cost and greater energy conversion
efficiency compared with thin film devices have led to a high level of activity in
nanowire research related to photovoltaic applications. This special issue also
contains results from an impedance spectroscopy study of core–shell GaAs
nanowires to throw light on the transport and recombination mechanisms relevant
to solar cell research [2].
Information technology research and renewable energy sources are research
areas of enormous public interest. This special issue addresses both theoretical
and experimental achievements and provides a stimulating outlook for
technological developments in these highly topical fields of research.
References
[1] Caram J, Sandoval C, Tirado M, Comedi D, Czaban J, Thompson D A and LaPierre R R 2010
Electrical characteristics of core–shell p-n GaAs nanowire structures with Te as the n-dopant
Nanotechnology 21 134007
[2] Baugh J, Fung J S and LaPierre R R 2010 Building a spin quantum bit register using
semiconductor nanowires Nanotechnology 21 134018