US Patent 7402505 - Single electron device formed by thermal annealing

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7402505.html

Single electron transistors and similar devices have been in the experimental stage for several decades now however, due to low temperature operation and difficulty in fabrication they have not seem much commercialization outside of research labs. This patent from Advanced Micro Devices teaches stacking dielectric and amorphous silicon layers with a laser annealed nanocrystal layer to improve controllability in fabrication. Claim 1 reads:

1. A method of manufacturing a semiconductor device, comprising the steps of:

forming a gate dielectric over a channel region in a substrate;

forming a layer of amorphous silicon over the gate dielectric;

forming a layer of nanocrystals by laser thermal annealing the layer of amorphous silicon;

forming a dielectric layer on the layer of amorphous silicon; and

repeating the steps of forming the layer of amorphous silicon and forming the dielectric layer.