The scientific community today uses the terms “nanoelectronics” and “nanoelectronics technologies” with two meanings. On one hand, the term “nanoelectronics” refers to the products of the evolutionary development of silicon-based microelectronic transistor technology represented by the miniaturisation and increased integration of elements, which does not necessarily imply instrumental implementation of quantum size effects. On the other hand, this term is also used to denote a combination of electronic instruments, devices and their production techniques based primarily on new effects (size quantisation, coulomb blockade, use of impurity atoms as qubits for quantum computers, etc.). On the scale of several tens of nanometres, the specific sizes of elements become comparable to certain fundamental physical values (e.g., shielding distance, electron path, de Broglie wavelength), which entails the emergence of new physical effects and the existence of some fundamental physical restrictions of the capabilities of such devices. This is how nanoelectronics differs from microelectronics, which relies on the macroscopic laws of classical physics.

Technological means and techniques adequate for the development of nanoelectronics products include both conventional techniques, such as molecular beam epitaxy and high-precision vapour deposition, and other methods that have proven to be extremely effective in nanoelectronics applications, for example, ion synthesis. Nanoelectronics technologies not only encompass means and techniques that were unheard of in microelectronics, such as the use of nanotubes and fullerenes; they also employ new approaches and developments to create, measure and analysse the parameters of nanostructured objects. These techniques include, for example, different methods of probe microscopy (tunnelling and atomic force microscopy) that may be used in both the study and creation of nanoelectronics.