Graphene Logic Gates

Abstract

Graphene is a biocompatible material that can be incorporated safely into living tissue. This property makes graphene an ideal material for bioelectronics applications. The main obstacle for using graphene as a material for bioelectronic circuits is the lack of a bandgap, which results in noneffective current switching. Here, we use rectangular L-shaped graphene nanoribbons as a building block for graphene logic gates. Electrons are initially transported along the zigzag-edged nanoribbon and then the transport direction changes by 90°, resulting in transport along the armchair edge. Our computations showed that electron scattering because of this change in the direction causes the appearance of a pseudobandgap, which is large enough for logic operations. This pseudobandgap appears as a zero-conductance region for electron energies near the Fermi level. We propose an and, an or, and a not logic gate and use tight-binding Hamiltonians and nonequilibrium Greens functions to show that these designs can reproduce effectively the desired logic operations.