Sapan Agarwal and Eli Yablonovitch

EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley

Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2014-6

January 23, 2014

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-6.pdf

There is a fundamental tradeoff between conductance and subthreshold swing voltage in tunnel field effect transistors that achieve a sharp turn off by modulating the tunnel barrier thickness. At high conductivities, the voltage bias has little control over the tunneling probability. Unfortunately, this results in a poor subthreshold swing voltage at high conductivities. In tunnel field effect transistors, the best sub 60mV/decade results occur only at very low current densities around 1nA/μm. At higher current densities the subthreshold swing voltage is observed to be much worse than 60mV/decade. We show that this is an inherent problem in quantum barrier thickness modulation, and that a different mechanism, band-edge energy filtering, is needed.

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BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Agarwal:EECS-2014-6,
    Author= {Agarwal, Sapan and Yablonovitch, Eli},
    Title= {Fundamental Tradeoff between Conductance and Subthreshold Swing Voltage for Barrier Thickness Modulation in Tunnel Field Effect Transistors},
    Year= {2014},
    Month= {Jan},
    Url= {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-6.html},
    Number= {UCB/EECS-2014-6},
    Abstract= {There is a fundamental tradeoff between conductance and subthreshold swing voltage in tunnel field effect transistors that achieve a sharp turn off by modulating the tunnel barrier thickness. At high conductivities, the voltage bias has little control over the tunneling probability. Unfortunately, this results in a poor subthreshold swing voltage at high conductivities. In tunnel field effect transistors, the best sub 60mV/decade results occur only at very low current densities around 1nA/μm. At higher current densities the subthreshold swing voltage is observed to be much worse than 60mV/decade. We show that this is an inherent problem in quantum barrier thickness modulation, and that a different mechanism, band-edge energy filtering, is needed.},
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Agarwal, Sapan 
%A Yablonovitch, Eli 
%T Fundamental Tradeoff between Conductance and Subthreshold Swing Voltage for Barrier Thickness Modulation in Tunnel Field Effect Transistors
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2014
%8 January 23
%@ UCB/EECS-2014-6
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-6.html
%F Agarwal:EECS-2014-6