Impact of strain on scaling of Double Gate nanoMOSFETs using NEGF approach

Abstract

AbstractThe effect of biaxial strain on double gate (DG) nanoscaled MOSFET with channel lengths in the nanometre range is investigated using Non‐Equilibrium Green's Functions (NEGF) simulations. The NEGF simulations are fully 2D in order to accurately evaluate the effects of strain in strongly confined channels. Starting with a 14 nm gate length DG MOSFET with a corresponding body thickness of 9 nm we scale the transistors to gate lengths of 10, 6 and 4 nm and body thicknesses of 6.1, 2.6 and 1.3 nm, respectively. The simulated ID‐VG characteristics show 11% improvement in the oncurrent for the 14 nm gate length transistor due to the Δ valley splitting. This improvement in the on‐current is due to separate contributions from the 2 fold and 4 fold valleys to the carrier transport. However, in the device with an extreme body thickness of 1.3 nm the strain has no impact on its performance because the strong confinement itself produces a large valley splitting. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)