Coulomb blockade: Poisson versus Pauli in a silicon quantum box

We discuss the limitations of the orthodox Coulomb-blockade theory when app lied to silicon quantum dots in the nanometer range and we present a simple Poisson-Schrodinger model to evaluate the quantum contribution in these ca ses. This contribution can be seen as a quantum capacitance in series with the sum of capacitance around the dot. This simple model gives results simi lar to a more sophisticated one which includes Pauli principle, with a prec ision of the order of room-temperature thermal-energy kT. Finally we show t hat the simple model can be easily included in micro-electronic simulators and therefore can be very effective to predict new properties of future qua ntum devices. All the effects discussed in this paper are room-temperature effects, (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd, All rights reserved.