Study of the role of different phonon scattering mechanisms on the performance of a GAA silicon nanowire transistor

Abstract

In this paper we study the effect that different phonon scattering mechanisms have on the performance of a silicon gate-all-around nanowire field effect transistor (GAA NWFET). The study is carried out using the Non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) formalism in the effective mass approximation. We consider the impact of the bias conditions on the influence of the different phonons on the transport characteristics. We show a quantitative and qualitative difference in the behaviours of the impact of the different phonons for different bias conditions. The simulations including all phonons reproduce the correct behaviour of previous simulations using a sophisticated tight-binding/NEGF approach [1] while presenting a much lower computational effort suitable for technology computer aided design (TCAD) applications. Finally, we confirm that the addition of the phonon related resistivity from simulations including only selected phonons (as proposed in Matthiessen's rule) does not add up to the resistivity of the simulation including all phonons together, underestimating in this way the total phonon related resistivity by 13%.