Ballistic performance and overshoot effects in gallenene nanoribbon field-effect transistors

Gallenene is a novel metallic 2D material that can provide a semiconducting counterpart if patterned into quasi-one-dimensional (quasi-1D) nanostructures, i.e., gallenene nanoribbons (GaNRs). We investigate semiconducting GaNRs as a potential channel material for future ultrascaled field-effect transistors (FETs) by employing quantum transport simulations based on Green's functions and tight-binding Hamiltonians with the orbital resolution calibrated on ab initio calculations. The impact of GaNR width downscaling from ∼6 nm down to ∼0.2 nm on the electronic, transport, and ballistic device properties is investigated for the FET channel length of 15 nm. We report current enhancement and injection velocity overshoot effects for sub-1.2 nm-wide nFETs and pFETs, with a maximum current increase of 53% in the 1.2 nm-wide GaNR pFET in comparison to the widest device. In addition, promising current-driving capabilities of n- and p-channel GaNR FETs are observed with top ballistic currents of more than 2.2 mA/μm and injection velocities of up to 2.4 × 107 cm/s. The reported data are explained by analyzing the evolution of band structure and related parameters such as injection velocity, quantum capacitance, effective transport mass etc., with increasing quantum confinement effects in ultranarrow GaNRs. Generally, we find that quasi-1D gallenene is a promising channel material for future nanoscale FETs, especially for transistor architectures based on stacked nanosheets.