Band offsets for biaxially and uniaxially stressed silicon-germanium layers with arbitrary substrate and channel orientations

Abstract

The conduction and valence band offsets between a strained silicon-germanium layer and a silicon-germanium substrate are reported for arbitrary substrate and channel crystal orientations. The offsets are calculated both for the case of biaxial stress, corresponding approximately to the stress state of a thin strained channel in a planar field-effect transistor (FET), and for uniaxial stress, which is the approximate stress state for strained channels in a FinFET configuration. Significant orientation dependence is found for the conduction band offset, overall leading to the strongest electron quantum confinement in biaxial-tensile stressed channels on {100}-oriented substrates, and uniaxial-tensile stressed channels in the ⟨100⟩ and ⟨110⟩ directions. For biaxially stressed layers on {111} substrates, the conduction band offset is significantly smaller than for {100} or {110} directions. For the valence band offset, the dependence on crystal orientation is found to be small.