Efficient simulations of the transport properties of spin field-effect transistors built on silicon fins

Abstract

Significant progress in integrated circuits performance has been supported by the miniaturization of the transistor feature size. With transistor scalability gradually slowing down new concepts have to be introduced in order to maintain the computational speed increase at reduced power consumption for future micro- and nanoelectronic devices. A promising alternative to the charge degree of freedom currently used in MOSFET switches is to take into account the spin degree of freedom. We computationally investigate transport properties of ballistic spin field-effect transistors (SpinFETs). These simulations require a significant amount of computational resources. To achieve the best performance of calculations we parallelize the code for a shared-memory multi-CPU system. As the result of the optimization of the whole model a significant speed-up in calculations is achieved. We demonstrate that the [100] oriented silicon fins are best suited for practical realizations of a SpinFET. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.