Analysis of Ge-Si Heterojunction Nanowire Tunnel FET: Impact of Tunneling Window of Band-to-Band Tunneling Model

Abstract

© The Author(s) 2017. Published by ECS. All rights reserved. Tunnel FET (TFET) has potential applications in the next generation ultra-low power transistor to substitute the conventional FETs. It can offer very steep inverse subthreshold swing slope to maintain a low leakage current, thus it can be very essential for limiting power consumption in MOSFETs. The carriers in TFET transport from source to channel by the band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) mechanisms. To realize high saturation currents of TFET, it critically depends on the transmission probability, T WKB . In indirect semiconductor, such as Si and Ge, the BTBT model is very crucial for designing and predicting the device performance. In this paper, we employed the nonlocal BTBT model applied to three-dimensional Ge-Si heterojunction TFET with gate length 10 nm compare with Si TFET by including quantum effects simulation. The results show that the Ge-Si TFET outperforms Si TFET because of the lower bandgap and larger tunneling windows. BTBT generation rates of Ge-Si TFET are higher than Si TFET in the on-state condition. The highest BTBT generation rates are located in the source and channel junction and its peaks close to the gate dielectric.