On the validity of the parabolic effective-mass approximation for the I-V calculation of silicon nanowire transistors

By Jing Wang, Anisur Rahman, Avik W. Ghosh, Gerhard Klimeck, Mark S. Lundstrom. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2004

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This paper examines the validity of the widely used parabolic effective-mass approximation for computing the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of silicon nanowire transistors (SNWTs). The energy dispersion relations for unrelaxed Si nanowires are first computed by using an sp/sup 3/d/sup 5/s/sup */ tight-binding (TB) model. A seminumerical ballistic field-effect transistor model is then adopted to evaluate the I-V characteristics of the (n-type) SNWTs based on both a TB dispersion relation and parabolic energy bands. In comparison with the TB approach, the parabolic effective-mass model with bulk effective-masses significantly overestimates SNWT threshold voltages when the wire width is <3 nm, and ON-currents when the wire width is <5 nm. By introducing two analytical equations with two tuning parameters, however, the effective-mass approximation can well reproduce the TB I-V results even at a /spl sim/1.36-nm wire width.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f9761ddb5f2b4c60969f0b7ea6bcdb394e45ee8

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Citations in the corpus

Bandstructure Effects in Silicon Nanowire Electron Transport (2007, methodology): “Other sophisticated techniques for electronic structure calculation also mention mass variations in nanostructures from their bulk values, which results in different threshold voltages and ON-current densities [15], [19].”