Contact block reduction method and its application to a 10 nm MOSFET device

Abstract

With the scaling of semiconductor devices to nano-size dimensions, gate lengths reach their physical limits of 8–15 nm. In such devices, a variety of undesirable effects begin to be prominent, including gate leakage, discrete impurity effects and source-to-drain tunnelling. To address the issue of source-to-drain tunnelling we apply to a prototypical 10 nm MOSFET device a novel highly efficient method, termed contact block reduction (CBR) method. It has been reported recently [1] that the CBR method allows us to calculate the ballistic current (transmission function) through an arbitrarily shaped, multi-terminal two- or three-dimensional device. Here we show that in the ballistic case the density matrix of the open device can be computed using the same method. This opens a possibility for an efficient fully quantum-mechanical self-consistent calculation within the ballistic limit.