Universal and reconfigurable logic gates in a compact three-terminal resonant tunneling diode

Submicron-sized mesas of resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) with split drain contacts have been realized and the current-voltage characteristics have been studied in the bistable regime at room temperature. Dynamically biased, the RTDs show noise-triggered firing of spikelike signals and can act as reconfigurable universal logic gates for small voltage changes of a few millivolt at the input branches. These observations are interpreted in terms of a stochastic nonlinear processes. The logic gate operation shows gain for the fired-signal bursts with transconductance slopes exceeding the thermal limit. The RTD junction can be easily integrated to arrays of multiple inputs and have thus the potential to mimic neurons in nanoelectronic circuits.