Abstract
As complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors approach the nanometer scale, it has become mandatory to incorporate suitable quantum formalism into electron transport simulators. In this work, we present the quantum enhancement of a 2D Multi-Subband Ensemble Monte Carlo (MS-EMC) simulator, which includes a novel module for the direct Source-to-Drain tunneling (S/D tunneling), and its verification in the simulation of Double-Gate Silicon-On-Insulator (DGSOI) transistors and FinFETs. Compared to ballistic Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function (NEGF) simulations, our results show accurate I vs. V and subthreshold characteristics for both devices. Besides, we investigate the impact of the effective masses extracted Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulations, showing that they are the key of not only the general thermionic emission behavior of simulated devices, but also the electron probability of experiencing tunneling phenomena.
Highlights
Conventional and novel transistor architectures have been scaled down in the last decades to achieve better performance and larger integration with both lower power consumption and cost
Two different approaches to consider S/D tunneling in MC are described in this work and their results with FinFET and Double-Gate Silicon-On-Insulator (DGSOI) are compared to those from Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function (NEGF) formalism
One of these models needs to be calibrated against quantum transport simulations
Summary
Conventional and novel transistor architectures have been scaled down in the last decades to achieve better performance and larger integration with both lower power consumption and cost. The direct Source-to-Drain tunneling (S/D tunneling) starts to play an important role degrading the subthreshold behavior when the channel length is reduced to below 10 nm [2,3], being traditionally considered as a scaling limit in ballistic Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function (NEGF) calculations [4], distorting the MOSFET operation at transistor channel lengths around 3nm [2]. This tunneling mechanism allows electrons to tunnel from the source to the drain through the narrow potential barrier existing between both regions, which is controlled by the gate. In the simulation of the direct tunneling phenomena, the employed band structure model must accurately represent the experimental energy gaps and effective masses for the most relevant subbands
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