Tight-binding study of quantum transport in nanoscale GaAs Schottky MOSFET

Abstract

This paper explores the band structure effect to elucidate the feasibility of an ultra-scaled GaAs Schottky MOSFET (SBFET) in a nanoscale regime. We have employed a 20-band sp3d5 s* tight-binding (TB) approach to compute E — K dispersion. The considerable difference between the extracted effective masses from the TB approach and bulk values implies that quantum confinement affects the device performance. Beside high injection velocity, the ultra-scaled GaAs SBFET suffers from a low conduction band DOS in the Γ valley that results in serious degradation of the gate capacitance. Quantum confinement also results in an increment of the effective Schottky barrier height (SBH). Enhanced Schottky barriers form a double barrier potential well along the channel that leads to resonant tunneling and alters the normal operation of the SBFET. Major factors that may lead to resonant tunneling are investigated. Resonant tunneling occurs at low temperatures and low drain voltages, and gradually diminishes as the channel thickness and the gate length scale down. Accordingly, the GaAs (100) SBFET has poor ballistic performance in nanoscale regime.