There is a fundamental tradeoff between conductance and subthreshold swing voltage in tunnel field effect transistors that achieve a sharp turn off by modulating the tunnel barrier thickness. At high conductivities, the voltage bias has little control over the tunneling probability. Unfortunately, this results in a poor subthreshold swing voltage at high conductivities. In tunnel field effect transistors, the best sub 60mV/decade results occur only at very low current densities around 1nA/micrometer. At higher current densities the subthreshold swing voltage is observed to be much worse than 60mV/decade. We show that this is an inherent problem in quantum barrier thickness modulation, and that a different mechanism, band-edge energy filtering, is needed.
Title
Fundamental Tradeoff between Conductance and Subthreshold Swing Voltage for Barrier Thickness Modulation in Tunnel Field Effect Transistors
Published
2014-01-23
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
EECS-2014-6
Type
Text
Extent
5 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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