An alternative treatment of heat flow for charge transport in semiconductor devices

Abstract

A unique thermodynamic model of Fermi gases suitable for semiconductor device simulation is presented. Like other models, such as drift diffusion and hydrodynamics, it employs moments of the Boltzmann transport equation derived using the Fermi–Dirac distribution function. However, unlike other approaches, it replaces the concept of an electron thermal conductivity with the heat capacity of an ideal Fermi gas to determine heat flow. The model is used to simulate a field-effect transistor and show that the external current-voltage characteristics are strong functions of the state space available to the heated Fermi distribution.