TCAD simulation of the doping-less TFET with Ge/SiGe/Si hetero-junction and hetero-gate dielectric for the enhancement of device performance

Abstract

The device structure of DLTFET is optimized by the Silvaco TCAD software to solve the problems of lower on-state current and larger miller capacitance of traditional doping-less tunneling field effect transistors (DLTFETs), and the performance can be greatly improved. Different from the traditional DLTFETs, the source region and pocket region of the doping-less TFET with the Ge/SiGe/Si hetero-junction and hetero-gate dielectric (H-DLTFET), respectively, use the narrow band-gap semiconductor Ge and SiGe materials, and the channel and drain region both use the silicon material. The H-DLTFET device use the Ge/SiGe hetero-junction engineering to decrease the tunneling barrier width, increase the band-to-band tunneling current, and obtain the higher current switching ratio and ultra-low sub-threshold swing (SS). Besides, the gate dielectric under auxiliary gate uses the low-k dielectric SiO2 material, which can effectively reduce the miller capacitance and improve the capacitance and frequency characteristics. The on-state current, switching ratio, trans-conductance, output current, and output conductance values of H-DLTFET can be increased by two, two, one, one, and one order of magnitude when compared with the DLTFET, respectively. Meanwhile, the point SS and average SS, respectively, decrease from 13 mV/Dec and 31.6 mV/Dec to 5 mV/Dec and 14.3 mV/Dec, and the gate-drain capacitance decrease from 0.99 fF/μm to 0.1 fF/μm. Besides, the cutoff frequency and gain bandwidth product of H-DLTFET are much larger than that of DLTFET, which can be explained by the excellent DC characteristics. The above simulation results show that the H-DLTFET has the better frequency characteristics, so it is more suitable for applications of ultra-low-power integrated circuits.