Search

Complementary logic based on tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) would drastically reduce power consumption thanks to the TFET's potential to obtain a sub-60mV/dec subthreshold swing (SS). However, p-type TFETs typically do not meet the performance of n-TFETs for direct bandgap III-V configurations. The p-TFET SS stays well above 60mV/dec, due to the low density of states in the conduction band. We therefore propose a source configuration in which a highly doped region is maintained only near the tunnel junction. In the remaining part of the source, the hot carriers in the exponential tail of the Fermi-Dirac distribution are blocked by reducing the doping degeneracy, either with a source section with a lower doping concentration or with a heterostructure. We apply this concept to n-p-i-p configurations consisting of In0.53Ga0.47As and an InP-InAs heterostructure. 15-band quantum mechanical simulations predict that the configurations with our source design can obtain sub-60mV/dec SS, with an on-current comparable to the conventional source design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trap-assisted tunneling (TAT) is a major hurdle in achieving a sub-60-mV/decade subthreshold swing (SS) in tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs). This paper presents an insight into the TAT process in the presence of field-induced quantum confinement (FIQC) in line TFETs. We show that the SS degradation in line TFETs is mainly caused by TAT through traps located in the bulk of the semiconductor nearby the gate dielectric. For an Si n-type TFET, the energy quantization in the conduction band is found to suppress the TAT through the interface-region traps by several orders of magnitude and delay the TAT through bulk traps nearby the gate dielectric with several hundreds of millivolts. The trap levels closer to the conduction band were found to be the most efficient for TAT in this n-TFET. The FIQC onset voltage shift in TAT through bulk taps is found to be smaller than the band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) shift, enhancing the effective SS degradation in TFETs. We therefore show that it is equally important to include the FIQC effect when calculating TAT as when calculating BTBT generation rates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]