Contact and channel resistances of ballistic and non-ballistic carbon-nanotube field-effect transistors

Recently, many research has been conducted on the carbon-nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) in expectation that the CNFETs could replace metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) in the sub-10-nm era. In consideration of both ballistic conduction and nonballistic conduction, including elastic scattering, optical phonon scattering, and acoustic phonon scattering, this paper presents the simulated dependence of the coaxially-gated single-walled semiconducting CNFET characteristics on the contact and the channel lengths. When the contact length was longer than 100 nm, the CNFETs showed a constant minimal value of the contact resistance. In this case, the saturated drain current was higher than that of CNFETs with a shorter contact length. When the channel was longer than 600 nm, the channel resistance was significantly increased due to acoustic phonon scattering. When the channel was shorter than 200 - 250 nm with optical scattering, acoustic scattering or all three scattering mechanisms taken into account, the contact resistance began to become larger than channel resistance.