Novel Attributes of a Dual Material Gate Nanoscale Tunnel Field-Effect Transistor

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the application of a Dual Material Gate (DMG) in a Tunnel Field Effect Transistor (TFET) to simultaneously optimize the on-current, the off-current and the threshold voltage, and also improve the average subthreshold slope, the nature of the output characteristics and the immunity against the DIBL effects. We demonstrate that if appropriate work-functions are chosen for the gate materials on the source side and the drain side, the tunnel field effect transistor shows a significantly improved performance. We apply the technique of DMG in a Strained Double Gate Tunnel Field Effect Transistor with a high-k gate dielectric to show an overall improvement in the characteristics of the device along with achieving a good on-current and an excellent average subthreshold slope. The results show that the DMG technique can be applied to TFETs with different channel materials, channel lengths, gate-oxide materials, gate-oxide thicknesses and power supply levels to achieve significant gains in the overall device characteristics.