Multilevel 3-D Device Simulation Approach Applied to Deeply Scaled Nanowire Field Effect Transistors

Three silicon nanowire (SiNW) field effect transistors (FETs) with 15-, 12.5- and 10.6-nm gate lengths are simulated using hierarchical multilevel quantum and semiclassical models verified against experimental ${I}_{D}$ – ${V}_{G}$ characteristics. The tight-binding (TB) formalism is employed to obtain the band structure in $\mathit {k}$ -space of ellipsoidal NWs to extract electron effective masses. The masses are transferred into quantum-corrected 3-D finite element (FE) drift-diffusion (DD) and ensemble Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, which accurately capture the quantum-mechanical confinement of the ellipsoidal NW cross sections. We demonstrate that the accurate parameterization of the bandstructure and the quantum-mechanical confinement has a profound impact on the computed ${I}_{D}$ – ${V}_{G}$ characteristics of nanoscaled devices. Finally, we devise a step-by-step technology computer-aided design (TCAD) methodology of simple parameterization for efficient DD device simulations.