This work investigates energy filtering in nanowires, where pass and stopbands are obtained by including superlattices in the wire. When a pair of such superlattices is placed in series, each being controlled by a gate, it can act as a transistor where the (mis-)alignment of its minibands turns the device on (off). It is shown that, in the ballistic current-regime, the transition between the on and off state occurs in a narrow gate-bias range, giving rise to sub-60 mV per decade switching behavior.
We propose a Heterojunction Vertical Tunneling FET and show using self-consistent ballistic quantum transport simulations that it can provide very steep subthreshold swings and high ON current, thereby improving the scalability of Tunnel FETs for high performance. The turn-on in pocket region of the device is dictated by modulation of heterojunction barrier height. The steepness of turn-on is increased because of simultaneous onset of tunneling in the pocket and the region underneath and also due to contribution to current by vertical tunneling in the pocket. These factors can be engineered by…
Steep transistors are crucial in lowering power consumption of the integrated circuits. However, the difficulties in achieving steepness beyond the Boltzmann limit experimentally have hindered the fundamental challenges in application of these devices in integrated circuits. From a sensitivity perspective, an ideal switch should have a high sensitivity to the gate voltage and lower sensitivity to the device design parameters like oxide and body thicknesses. In this work, conventional tunnel-FET (TFET) and negative capacitance FET are shown to suffer from high sensitivity to device design param…
Ballistic quantum transport calculations based on the non-equilbrium Green's function formalism show that field-effect transistor devices made from chevron-type graphene nanoribbons (CGNRs) could exhibit negative differential resistance with peak-to-valley ratios in excess of 4800 at room temperature as well as steep-slope switching with 6 mV/decade subtheshold swing over five orders of magnitude and ON-currents of 88$μ$A/$μ$m. This is enabled by the superlattice-like structure of these ribbons that have large periodic unit cells with regions of different effective bandgap, resulting in miniba…
A tunneling field effect transistor based on armchair graphene nanoribbons is studied using ballistic quantum transport simulation based on 3D real space nonequilibrium Green's function formalism. By introducing a pocket doping region near the source, the performance of GNRs TFET is improved in terms of larger on current and steeper subthreshold swings compared to conventional tunneling FET. It is also found that pocket region introduces two interesting features. By increasing the pocket length the ambipolar can be effectively suppressed. Furthermore, there is negative trans-conductance at neg…
Room-temperature Fermi-Dirac electron thermal excitation in conventional three-dimensional (3D) or two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors generates hot electrons with a relatively long thermal tail in energy distribution. These hot electrons set a fundamental obstacle known as the "Boltzmann tyranny" that limits the subthreshold swing (SS) and therefore the minimum power consumption of 3D and 2D field-effect transistors (FETs). Here, we investigated a novel graphene (Gr)-enabled cold electron injection where the Gr acts as the Dirac source to provide the cold electrons with a localized electron d…
Negative capacitance field-effect transistors (NC-FETs) have attracted wide interest as promising candidates for steep-slope devices, and sub-60 mV/decade switching has been demonstrated in NC-FETs with various device structures and material systems. However, the detailed mechanisms of the observed steep-slope switching in some of these experiments are under intense debate. Here we show that sub-60 mV/decade switching can be observed in a WS2 transistor with a metal-insulator-metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIMIS) structure - without any ferroelectric component. This structure resembles an NC-F…
The availability of transistors capable of operating at low supply voltage is essential to improve the key performance metric of computing circuits, i.e., the number of operations per unit energy. In this paper, we propose a new device concept for energy-efficient, steep-slope transistors based on heterojunctions of 2D materials. We show that by injecting electrons from an isolated and weakly dispersive band into a strongly dispersive one, subthermionic subthreshold swings can be obtained, as a result of a cold-source effect and of a reduced thermalization of carriers. This mechanism is implem…
Steep-slope $β$-Ga$_2$O$_3$ nano-membrane negative capacitance field-effect transistors (NC-FETs) are demonstrated with ferroelectric hafnium zirconium oxide in gate dielectric stack. Subthreshold slope less than 60 mV/dec at room temperature is obtained for both forward and reverse gate voltage sweeps with a minimum value of 34.3 mV/dec at reverse gate voltage sweep and 53.1 mV/dec at forward gate voltage sweep at $V_{DS}$=0.5 V. Enhancement-mode operation with threshold voltage ~0.4 V is achieved by tuning the thickness of $β$-Ga$_2$O$_3$ membrane. Low hysteresis of less than 0.1 V is obtain…
A bilayer graphene based electrostatically doped tunnel field-effect transistor (BED-TFET) is proposed in this work. Unlike graphene nanoribbon TFETs in which the edge states deteriorate the OFF-state performance, BED-TFETs operate based on different bandgaps induced by vertical electric fields in the source, channel, and drain regions without any chemical doping. The performance of the transistor is evaluated by self-consistent quantum transport simulations. This device has several advantages: 1) ultra-low power (VDD=0.1V), 2) high performance (ION/IOFF>104), 3) steep subthreshold swing (SS<1…
We report on measurements and modeling of FE HfZrO/SiO2 Ferroelectric-Dielectric (FE-DE) FETs which indicate that many of the phenomena attributed to Negative Capacitance can be explained by a delayed response of ferroelectric domain switching - referred to as Transient Negative Capacitance (TNC). No traversal of the stabilized negative capacitance branch is required. Modeling is used to correlate the hysteretic properties of the ferroelectric material to the measured transient and subthreshold slope (SS) behavior. It is found that steep SS can be understood as a transient phenomenon, present …
The bandgap dependence on the number of atomic layers of some families of 2D-materials, can be exploited to engineer and use lateral heterostructures (LHs) as high-performance Field-Effect Transistors (FET). This option can provide very good lattice matching as well as high heterointerface quality. More importantly, this bandgap modulation with layer stacking can give rise to steep transitions in the density of states (DOS) of the 2D material, that can eventually be used to achieve sub-60 mV/decade subthreshold swing in LH-FETs thanks to an energy-filtering source. We have observed this effect…
An increase in power consumption necessitates a low-power circuit technology to extend Moore's law. Low-power transistors, such as tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs), negative-capacitance field-effect transistors (NC-FETs), and Dirac-source field-effect transistors (DS-FETs), have been realised to break the thermionic limit of the subthreshold swing (SS). However, a low-power diode rectifier, which breaks the thermionic limit of an ideality factor (n) of 1 at room temperature, has not been proposed yet. In this study, we have realised a DS Schottky diode, which exhibits a steep-slope char…
We investigate the design of steep-slope metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) exploiting monolayers of transition metal dihalides as channel materials. With respect to other previously proposed steep-slope transistors, these devices require simplified manufacturing processes, as no confinement of the 2D material is needed, nor any tunneling heterojunction or ferroelectric gate insulators, and only n- or p-type contacts are demanded. We demonstrate their operation by studying an implementation based on monolayer CrI$_2$ through quantum transport simulations. We show that…
The so-called Boltzmann Tyranny defines the fundamental thermionic limit of the subthreshold slope (SS) of a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) at 60 mV/dec at room temperature and, therefore, precludes the lowering of the supply voltage and the overall power consumption. Adding a ferroelectric negative capacitor to the gate stack of a MOSFET may offer a promising solution to bypassing this fundamental barrier. Meanwhile, two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, such as atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) due to their low dielectric constant, and ease of…
Recently, cold source transistor (CSFET) with steep-slope subthreshold swing (SS) < 60 mV/decade has been proposed to overcome Boltzmann tyranny in its ballistic regime. However the scattering, especially by inelastic scattering may lead serious SS degradation through cold carrier thermalization. In this study, the electronic excitation/relaxation dynamic process is investigated theoretically by virtue of the state-of-the-art nonadiabatic molecular dynamics (NAMD) method, i.e., the mixed quantum-classical NAMD. The mixed quantum-classical NAMD considers both carrier decoherence and detailed ba…
