Simulation of Schottky barrier MOSFET's with a coupled quantum injection/Monte Carlo technique

A full-band Monte Carlo device simulator has been used to analyze the performance of sub-0.1 μm Schottky barrier MOSFET's. In these devices, the source and drain contacts are realized with metal silicide, and the injection of carriers is controlled by gate voltage modulation of tunneling through the source barrier. A simple model treating the silicide regions as metals, coupled with an Airy function approach for tunneling through the barrier, provides injecting boundary conditions for the Monte Carlo procedure. Simulations were carried out considering a p-channel device with 270 angstrom gate length for which measurements are available. Our results show that in these structures there is not a strong interaction with the oxide interface as in conventional MOS devices and carriers are injected at fairly wide angles from the source into the bulk of the device. The Monte Carlo simulations not only give good agreement with current-voltage (I-V) curves, but also easily reproduce the subthreshold behavior since all the computational power is devoted to simulation of channel particles. The simulations also clarify why these structures exhibit a large amount of leakage in subthreshold regime, due to both thermionic and tunneling emission. Computational experiments suggest ways to modify the doping profile to reduce to some extent the leakage.