Boundary conditions with Pauli exclusion and charge neutrality: application to the Monte Carlo simulation of ballistic nanoscale devices

Abstract

Electron transport becomes (quasi-) ballistic for nanoscale devices with active regions smaller than 20 nm. Under these conditions, the current and the noise are mainly determined by the electron injection process. Thus, the numerical simulation of these small devices can be very sensible to the boundary conditions (BC). In this work, we present a novel BC for (time-dependent) particle simulators that fulfill Fermi statistics and charge neutrality at the contacts. Monte Carlo simulations of a nanometric two-terminal device using a traditional injection model and the novel model presented in this work are compared.