Resonant Tunneling Diode by Means of Compound Armchair Boron/Nitride and Graphene Nanoribbons

Abstract

The band gap of armchair graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs) can be modulated by replacing the carbon atoms with boron/nitride (BN) atoms to produce the compound nanoribbons, while the width of ribbons remains constant. By introducing BN doping atoms in the proper positions along the ribbon length, a double-barrier quantum-well structure is constructed. Consequently, negative differential resistance properties can be obtained by a combination of armchair BN nanoribbons (ABNNRs) and AGNRs as the compound ABNxGyNRs, in which x and y denote the number of BN and C atoms in the ribbon width, respectively. The proposed resonant tunneling diode (RTD), called an armchair BN graphene nanoribbon resonant tunneling diode (ABNGNR-RTD), is investigated in three different platforms including W, S, and H shapes. The numerical tight-binding model along with non-equilibrium Green’s function formalism is taken into account to study the electronic properties of the proposed RTD. The performance of the ABNGNR-RTD is examined in terms of device characteristics such as peak-to-valley ratio (PVR) and power dissipation. Based on the presented results, the performance of H-shaped devices is better than those of the other two cases in terms of PVR and power dissipation. In addition, the electronic properties of ABNGNR-RTDs can be modified by varying the relative width of ABNNRs with respect to AGNRs.