Charge-plasma based symmetrical-gate complementary electron–hole bilayer TFET with improved performance for sub-0.5 V operation

Abstract

In this paper, the complementary charge-plasma (CP) based symmetrical-gate electron–hole bilayer (EHB) tunnel field-effect transistor (TFET) at a low operating voltage (⩽0.5 V) is introduced. Where, by using CP technique, the source/drain and EHB-channel is induced by depositing metal electrode with appropriate work function. Moreover, the immunity against random dopant fluctuations and the feasibility of a self-aligned process due to a symmetrical top/bottom gate arrangement without the need for a high thermal annealing process make the fabrication of the proposed EHB-TFET very reliable and efficient. Moreover, by implementing the density gradient quantum correction model, the quantum confinement and its effect on confining the 2D electron–hole concentration are also corrected as the proposed device has a smaller channel thickness of 5 nm. The proposed device shows superior performance against almost all Si-based CP-TFETs with a higher ON-current of 47.33 μA μm−1, a smaller average subthreshold swing of 13.53 mV dec−1 and a high ON-current to OFF-current ratio of 2.16 × 1013. This indicates that the proposed device is a promising candidate for future low-power applications.