Time-resolved analysis of dual-gate FETs with non-parabolic energy dispersion for THz applications

Abstract

The investigation of charge carrier transport in state-of-the-art nanoelectronic devices based on III/V semiconductors proves to be challenging, even more so when the highly non-parabolic energy dispersion exhibited by these materials is taken into account. Unlike the common approach of neglecting this behavior by the use of the parabolic band approximation, a novel combination of a tight-binding approach with a quantum Liouville-type equation is introduced here, where any arbitrary energy dispersion can effectively be included. This leads to a discretization based on the atomic structure without the need for finite difference approximations of the Hamiltonian. Because this allows for the stationary as well as the transient simulation of quantum charge carrier transport, it is well suited for the analysis of ultrathin FETs such as dual-gate FETs when it is combined with a mode-space approach. We demonstrate that the parabolic approximation not only vastly underestimates the current densities when compared to the non-parabolic case but also fails to capture transient effects such as gain compression when amplifier operation is considered.