Abstract:

The general trend in the electronics industry to increase the density of integrated circuits leads to the reduction of the size of Si transistors to their fundamental limit. Innovative device structures and new materials must then be explored to continue the fast progress of information technology and telecommunications. Intensive research is now concentrated on strained materials and heterostructure devices which cannot be accurately analyzed with traditional drift-diffusion or hydrodynamic simulators. This work generalizes a full-band particle-based simulation tool to handle these new crystal structures and devices. This goal was achieved by considering the most important aspects for this work: the full band structure as calculated by the Empirical Pseudopotential Method (EPM) including non-local and spin-orbit interactions, generalized to any given lattice, the full phonon dispersion calculated via three different models to allow the compatibility with the data available in the literature, and the different scattering mechanisms which regulate the dynamics of charge carriers within a material. A particular effort was made to optimize the implementation of the phonon-electron scattering mechanism based on the computationally demanding rigid pseudo-ion model, and a reduction by a factor of 30 of the time required to compute the scattering tables was achieved by interpolating the states of the carriers. A quantum correction based on an effective potential was also investigated and applied in the simulation of a 85 nm AlInSb/InSb Quantum Well transistor, resulting in a Drain Barrier Induced Lowering (DIBL) of 693 mV/V, and a sub-threshold slope of 427 mV/dec. The characterization of the dynamic behavior of new device structures was then performed, yielding the extraction of important figures of merit, such as the cutoff frequency and the frequency-dependent current gain. The step function, the sinc pulse, and the monochromatic sinusoidal function were investigated and compared as three different excitation waveforms, showing good agreement with one another.