Dislocations in Microelectronics

This brief review monitors the use of small crystalline defects, such as dislocations, in the design of diodes, bipolar and field effect transistors along the microminiaturization trend in electronics. Attempts to make dislocation based electronic components were driven at various stages by the development of semiconductor technology and were inspired by successes of miniaturization. In the early 80's, use of single dislocations as electronic elements on a semiconductor chip was seen as a viable alternative to make the smallest transistor. Successful development of low-dimensional electronic devices significantly reduced the necessity for potential use of linear defects. The experimental diagrams and tables are intentionally excluded from this paper. They can be found in the references, especially in the extended reviews [14, 22, 35] on the subject.