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VLSI Design
Volume 13 (2001), Issue 1-4, Pages 5-13
doi:10.1155/2001/16023
Simulating Quasi-ballistic Transport in Si Nanotransistors
1School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 1285 EE Building, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
2Div. of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
3Dept. of Mathematics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Copyright © 2001 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Electron transport in model Si nanotransistors is examined by numerical simulation using a hierarchy of simulation methods, from full Boltzmann, to hydrodynamic, energy transport, and drift-diffusion. The on-current of a MOSFET is shown to be limited by transport across a low-field region about one mean-free-path long and located at the beginning of the channel. Commonly used transport models based on simplified solutions of the Boltzmann equation are shown to fail under such conditions. The cause for this failure is related to the neglect of the carriers' drift energy and to the collision-dominated assumptions typically used in the development of simplified transport models.