Abstract
In addition to cryogenic techniques, energy filtering has the potential to achieve high-performance low-noise 2-D electronic systems. Assemblies based on graphene quantum dots (GQDs) have been demonstrated to exhibit interesting transport properties, including resonant tunnelling. In this paper, we investigate GQDs based structures with the goal of producing energy filters for next generation lower-power lower-noise 2-D electronic systems. We evaluate the electron transport properties of the proposed GQD device structures to demonstrate electron energy filtering and the ability to control the position and magnitude of the energy passband by appropriate device dimensioning. We also show that the signal-to-thermal noise ratio performance of the proposed nanoscale device can be modified according to device geometry. The tunability of two-dimensional GQD structures indicates a promising route for the design of electron energy filters to produce low-power and low-noise electronics.