Device Criteria for Accurate Single Electron Pumping

Pumping electrons for both quantum information and metrological purposes is of great interest. Minimizing errors in moving electrons is very important for both fields. A variety of designs and operating modes for transferring electrons in these tunable barrier pumps has been pursued, utilizing one or more AC signals. Different operating modes have different demands on device performance, but there are some general rules to device design. Criteria such as gate-gate capacitance, gate-dot capacitance, barrier steepness, charging energy and temperature are the most important. Here we present results, using basic principles and experimental data, on designing and operating a tunable barrier CMOS charge pump. We will cover device requirements for low error charge pumping using a variety of modes, and present pumping results of a device operating in each of the presented modes.