Ballistic modeling of InAs nanowire transistors

In this work, the intrinsic performance of InAs nanowire transistors is evaluated in the ballistic limit. A self-consistent Schrodinger-Poisson solver is utilized in the cylindrical geometry, while accounting for conduction band non-parabolicity. The transistor characteristics are derived from simulations of ballistic transport within the nanowire. Using this approach, the performance is calculated for a continuous range of nanowire diameters and the transport properties are mapped. A transconductance exceeding 4 S/mm is predicted at a gate overdrive of 0.5 V and it is shown that the performance is improved with scaling. Furthermore, the influence from including self-consistency and non-parabolicity in the band structure simulations is quantified. It is demonstrated that the effective mass approximation underestimates the transistor performance due to the highly non-parabolic conduction band in InAs. Neglecting self-consistency severely overestimates the device performance, especially for thick nanowires. The error introduced by both of these approximations gets increasingly worse under high bias conditions. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved