A tradeoff between on and off current for armchair graphene nanoribbon field effect transistors explained by the complex band structure

Abstract

We showed the ballistic quantum transport calculation results for the armchair graphene nanoribbon field effect transistors, based on full complex band structure. We then compared the minimum leakage current in the ID-VG curve and the on current in the ID-VD curve. It is demonstrated that in order to have the best performance of the nanoscale graphene nanoribbon field effect transistors, trade offs are found for the off state leakage current and the on state current, i.e., we found that a smaller/larger off state leakage current in ID-VG curve may be accompanied with a smaller/larger on current in ID-VD curve, which is then explained by full complex band structure characteristics.