A lateral resonant tunneling FET

Abstract

A lateral resonant tunneling FET (RTFET) is proposed. The RTFET has three closely spaced gates. The outer gates control the barrier heights, and the inner gate controls the potential of the quantum well. These gates are capacitively coupled to the barriers and the well, therefore, the gate currents are very small. Modeling and computer simulation show that the RTFET should have an improved peak-to-valley ratio, narrower current peak widths, and more uniform distribution of peak currents than that of a conventional resonant tunneling diode with the same structure. Furthermore, a unique feature of this device is that the barrier height can be adjusted, which allows the current peak, the peak-to-valley ratio, and the peak positions to be tuned.