A study of performance enhancement in uniaxial stressed silicon nanowire field effect transistors

The performance of uniaxially strained Si nanowires (SiNWs) is investigated with the multiband k.p method. A rigorous quantum-mechanical calculation of hole current based on the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) method is carried out. For both unstrained/strained-SiNWs, the necessity of using the tuned k.p parameters instead of the bulk k.p parameters for nano-scaled devices is examined by benchmarking with the tight-binding (TB) method. The on-current characteristics of the unstrained/strained-SiNWs are analyzed as a function of the aspect ratio of channel length (L) and width (W). The amount of on-current increase due to strain is quantitatively calculated, which shows an increasing behavior with respect to L/W.