A thymine-based molecular structure to design logic gates and memory devices

• Published in: Journal of computational electronics Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 80 - 85
• Main Authors: Vohra, Rajan, Sawhney, Ravinder Singh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-02-2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Bias; Crystallography; Current voltage characteristics; Electrical Engineering; Electrodes; Electronic circuits; Engineering; Fast Fourier transformations; Gates; Gold; Logic; Logic circuits; Mathematical and Computational Engineering; Mathematical and Computational Physics; Mechanical Engineering; Memory devices; Molecular structure; Optical and Electronic Materials; Temperature; Theoretical; Thymine; Transport properties; Electronic devices; AND gate; Memory device; OR gate; Rectification ratio; Thymine
• ISSN: 1569-8025; 1572-8137
• DOI: 10.1007/s10825-021-01820-6

A computational study is carried out on thymine using the two-probe method. A thymine molecule with thiol anchors is sandwiched between two gold electrodes having  crystallographic orientation. The electrical transport characteristics are analyzed using the extended Hückel theory with two-dimensional (2D) fast Fourier transform (FFT) computations to understand the use of thymine in the design of memory devices and logic gates. The temperature is taken to be 300 K, with a mesh cutoff value of 75 Hartree. A linear
I
–
V
characteristic is obtained for higher values of the current for the thymine-based device. This can be explained based on the strong coupling of the molecule with the gold electrodes in the scattering region. Moreover, the rectification ratio at 2 V and 1 V is applied to design an AND and OR gate, respectively. Furthermore, a memory device based on these gates is demonstrated. The results indicate that such molecular devices based on one of the bases of DNA (thymine) may have possible applications in electronic devices, thereby enabling further miniaturization of electronic circuits.