Simulation of Nanowire Tunneling Transistors: From the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin Approximation to Full-Band Phonon-Assisted Tunneling
Date of this Version
4-27-2010Citation
J. Appl. Phys. 107, 084507 (2010)
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Timothy Boykin for helpful discussions. This work was partially supported by NSF under Grant No. EEC-0228390 that funds the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, by NSF PetaAps under Grant No. OCI-0749140, by the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative through the Midwest Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery, and by NSF through TeraGrid resources provided by the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS). This research also used resources of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.
Abstract
Nanowire band-to-band tunneling field-effect transistors TFETs are simulated using the Wentzel– Kramers–Brillouin WKB approximation and an atomistic, full-band quantum transport solver including direct and phonon-assisted tunneling PAT. It is found that the WKB approximation properly works if one single imaginary path connecting the valence band VB and the conduction band CB dominates the tunneling process as in direct band gap semiconductors. However, PAT is essential in Si and Ge nanowire TFETs where multiple, tightly-coupled, imaginary paths exist between the VB and the CB. © 2010 American Institute of Physics. doi:10.1063/1.3386521
Keywords
Discipline(s)
Engineering | Nanoscience and Nanotechnology