Negative differential resistance (NDR) is a physical effect, which is widespread in quantum electronics from tunneling diodes up to memristors. Although NDR has been discovered many decades ago, there are still hundreds of papers published in the last years dealing with this effect. Since many quantum devices are nowadays fabricated at atomic scale, the NDR effect opens new applications. This manuscript is an overview of various physical phenomena, which produce NDR effects in nanoscale devices. These phenomena include quantum tunneling, the ballistic electronic transport in nanostructures and insulator–metal transitions, which are common in nanoscale devices for high-frequency applications or for new computing architectures, such as reversible computation, quantum computation and neuromorphic computing.

负微分电阻 (NDR) 是一种物理效应，在量子电子学中广泛存在，从隧道二极管到忆阻器。尽管 NDR 在几十年前就已被发现，但在过去几年中仍然有数百篇论文涉及这种效应。由于现在许多量子器件都是在原子尺度上制造的，因此 NDR 效应开辟了新的应用。这份手稿是对各种物理现象的概述，这些物理现象在纳米级设备中产生 NDR 效应。这些现象包括量子隧穿、纳米结构中的弹道电子传输和绝缘体-金属跃迁，这些现象在用于高频应用或新计算架构（如可逆计算、量子计算和神经形态计算）的纳米级设备中很常见。