Dopingless Tunnel Field-Effect Transistor With Oversized Back Gate: Proposal and Investigation

Abstract

Tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) have shown attractive device performance making them a potential candidate to replace MOSFETs in future technologies. However, the inherent ambipolar characteristic of TFETs poses challenge in digital applications. The gate–drain overlap in conventional TFETs efficiently suppresses the ambipolar conductivity. On the other hand, in dopingless TFETs (DLTFETs), due to the requirement of separate gate and drain electrodes for electrostatically creating doped and intrinsic regions, gate–drain overlap cannot be realized. However, gate–drain overlap can be effectively realized using oversized back gate (OBG). Therefore, in this paper, we have proposed a DLTFET with an OBG that effectively suppresses ambipolar behavior even upto gate voltage ${V}_{\textsf {GS}} = -\textsf {1}$ V. Misalignment study is also performed for the gate length ${L}_{G} = \textsf {20}$ nm which has been reported to degrade the tunneling phenomenon at gate–source interface. It is observed that the proposed device is more tolerant to misalignment due to its OBG. The OBG also provides improvement in ${I}_{\textsf {on}}$ ( $\sim 1.4\times $ ) due to enhanced band bending at gate–source interface. To demonstrate the advantage of proposed device architecture over existing architectures, we compare the performance of proposed device with other existing techniques such as dual material gate and dual material drain architectures. The OBG-DLTFET has shown better ambipolar and on-state characteristics in comparison to the existing techniques.