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The development of high-performance p-type oxides with high hole mobility and a wide bandgap is critical for the applications of metal oxide semiconductors in vertically integrated CMOS devices [Salahuddin et al., Nat. Electron. 1, 442 (2018)]. Sn2+-based oxides such as SnO and K2Sn2O3 have recently been proposed as high-mobility p-type oxides due to their relatively low effective hole masses, which result from delocalized Sn s-orbital character at the valence band edge. Here, we introduce a promising ternary Sn-O-X compound, Ta2SnO6, which exhibits strong valence band dispersion and a large bandgap. In order to evaluate the performance of this oxide as a p-type semiconductor, we perform first-principles calculations of the phonon-limited room-temperature carrier mobilities in SnO, SnO2, and Ta2SnO6. Electron relaxation time is evaluated, accounting for the scatterings from acoustic deformation potentials and polar optical phonons (POP), within the isotropic and dispersionless approximation. At room temperature, the electron/hole mobilities in a given material (SnO, SnO2, and Ta2SnO6) are found to be limited by POP scattering. SnO2 shows high room-temperature electron mobility of 192 cm2/(V s), while SnO and Ta2SnO6 exhibit impressive hole mobilities, with the upper limit at 60 and 33 cm2/(V s), respectively. We find that carrier effective mass largely accounts for the differences in mobility between these oxides with correspondingly different POP scattering rates. The theoretically predicted intrinsic mobilities of each material will provide the upper limit to the real mobilities for their device applications. Our findings also suggest a necessity of further investigation to identify even higher mobility p-type oxides with smaller hole effective masses.

We developed a semi-analytical quasi-ballistic transport model for the nanowire metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors, dealing with finite lengths of source, channel, and drain. For the modeling, we used a combination of one-flux scattering matrices and analytical solutions of Boltzmann transport equations. The developed model was in quantitatively good agreement with numerical results, and well represented intermediate-scaled devices. In addition, we illustrated that the finite source seriously affect the distribution function of the carriers injected from the source, and the finite drain does for the backscattering into the channel from the drain. Finally, our model and results would help to understand physical aspects regarding quasi-ballistic transport in nanoscale devices.

A study on size-dependent subband structures of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) aligned along [100] direction, ranging from 0.77 to 2.69 nm in width, is performed by the first-principles calculation. Combined with a compact model adopting Landauer’s formula, on-currents of ballistic SiNW field effect transistors (FETs) are estimated and assessment of size-dependent performance is conducted. Size-dependent injection velocity strongly depends on Fermi level measured from the conduction band edge when carriers are degenerate. It is also supposed that the Fermi level has a peak value at a certain wire width. Despite variation in the size-dependent Fermi level and injection velocity, large SiNW FETs show large on-currents owing to their larger gate capacitances resulting from longer periphery. The on-current in the case of a multichannel SiNW FET reveals that size-dependent subband structures of nanowires have a serious effect on performance. As the results, although the normalized on-current decreases with decrease...