It is common to differentiate between two ways of building a nanodevice: a top-down approach where we start from something big and chisel out what we want and a bottom-up approach where we start from something small like atoms or molecules and assemble what we want. When it comes to describing electrical resistance, the standard approach could be called a "top-down" one that starts from large conductors and works its way down. In this talk I will present a different view of electrical conduction, one that could be called a bottom-up viewpoint. I use this viewpoint to introduce listeners to the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) method widely used to simulate all kinds of nanoscale devices from small molecules to carbon nanotubes to silicon nanotransistors.

NCN@Purdue Student Leadership Team
Network for Computational Nanotechnology
The Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing

If you reference this work in a publication, please cite as follows:

• Datta, Supriyo (2005), "Nanodevices: A Bottom-up View," http://www.nanohub.org/resources/385/.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. carbon nanotubes
2. devices
3. molecular electronics
4. nanoelectronics
5. tutorial