Search Results (2)

It has recently been demonstrated how the nitrogen dopant concentration in graphene can be controlled spatially on the nano-meter scale using a molecular mask. This technique may be used to create ballistic electron optics-like structures of high/low doping regions; for example, to focus electron beams, harnessing the quantum wave nature of the electronic propagation. Here, we employ large-scale Greens function transport calculations based on a tight-binding approach. We first benchmark different tight-binding models of nitrogen in graphene with parameters based on density functional theory (DFT) and the virtual crystal approximation (VCA). Then, we study theoretically how the random distribution within the masked regions and the discreteness of the nitrogen scattering centers impact the transport behavior of sharp $n-p$ and $n-n^{\prime }$ interfaces formed by different, realistic nitrogen concentrations. We investigate how constrictions for the current can be realized by patterned high/low doping regions with experimentally feasible nitrogen concentrations. The constrictions can guide the electronic current, while the quantized conductance is significantly washed out due to the nitrogen scattering. The implications for device design is that a $p-n$ junction with nitrogen corrugation should still be viable for current focusing. Furthermore, a guiding channel with less nitrogen in the conducting canal preserves more features of quantized conductance and, therefore, its low-noise regime. Full article

Using a state-of-the-art quantum transport simulator based on the effective mass approximation, we have thoroughly studied the impact of variability on ${\mathrm{Si}}_x{\mathrm{Ge}}_{1-x}$ channel gate-all-around nanowire metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (NWFETs) associated with random discrete dopants, line edge roughness, and metal gate granularity. Performance predictions of NWFETs with different cross-sectional shapes such as square, circle, and ellipse are also investigated. For each NWFETs, the effective masses have carefully been extracted from $s{p}^3{d}^5{s}^{\ast }$ tight-binding band structures. In total, we have generated 7200 transistor samples and performed approximately 10,000 quantum transport simulations. Our statistical analysis reveals that metal gate granularity is dominant among the variability sources considered in this work. Assuming the parameters of the variability sources are the same, we have found that there is no significant difference of variability between SiGe and Si channel NWFETs. Full article