3D Self-Consistent Quantum Transport Simulation for GaAs Gate-All-Around Nanowire Field-Effect Transistor with Elastic and Inelastic Scattering Effects

As the gate length of metal-oxide-semiconductor-field-effect transistor has been scaled down to the sub-10 nm regime, semi-classical Boltzmann transport theory can no longer satisfactorily describe the behavior of carrier transport since the quantum mechanical effects start to play a dominant role. Non-equilibrium Green's function formalism (NEGF) is a fully quantum mechanical approach which can take the wave nature of electron into account, and it provides a flexible framework for including the incoherent and dissipative transport processes. In this work, the authors develope an efficient three-dimensional quantum transport simulator based on solving the NEGF and Poisson equations self-consistently to investigate the electron transport in GaAs gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire field-effect transistor (NWFET) with considering electron-phonon scattering, ionized impurity (IMP) scattering, and surface roughness (SR) scattering. Several transport properties and device characteristics can be captured by the proposed solver, such as current spectrum broadening, electron relaxation, and the role of scattering effects. It allows to think the underlying physics in a different way, which will be useful for designing and predicting the performance of transistors in nanoscale.