Growing a silicon(Si) layer on top of stacked Si-germanium(Ge) compressive layer can introduce a tensile strain on the former, resulting in superior device characteristics. Such a structure can be used for high performance complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor(CMOS) circuits. Down scaling metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors(MOSFETs) into the deep submicron/nanometer regime forces the source(S) and drain(D) series resistance to become comparable with the channel resistance and thus it cannot be neglected. Owing to the persisting technological importance of strained Si devices, in this work, we propose a multi-iterative technique for evaluating the performance of strained-Si/strained-Si_(1-y)Ge_y/relaxed-Si_(1-x)Ge_x MOSFETs and its related circuits in the presence of S/D series resistance, leading to the development of a simulator that can faithfully plot the performance of the device and related digital circuits. The impact of strain on device/circuit performance is also investigated with emphasis on metal gate and high-k dielectric materials.
Strained-Si0.73Ge0.27 channels are successfully integrated with high-R/metal gates in p-type metai-oxide- semi- conductor field effect transistors (pMOSFETs) using the replacement post-gate process. A silicon cap and oxide inter layers are inserted between Si0.73Ge0.27 and high-κ dielectric to improve the interface. The fab- ricated Si0.73Ge0.27 pMOSFETs with gate length of 3Onto exhibit good performance with high drive current (~428μA/μm at VDD = 1 V) and suppressed short-channel effects (DIBL^77mV/V and SS^90mV/decade). It is found that the enhancement of effective hole mobility is up to 200% in long-gate-length Si0.73Ge0.27-channel pMOSFETs compared with the corresponding silicon transistors. The improvement of device performance is reduced due to strain relaxation as the gate length decreases, while 26% increase of the drive current is still obtained for 30-nm-gate-length Si0.73Ge0.27 devices.
The effects of multiple scattering on the electron transport properties in drain regions are numerically investigated for the cases of strained-Si diodes with or without scattering in the channel. The performance of non- ballistic (with scattering) channel Si-diodes is compared with that of ballistic (without scattering) channel Si-diodes, using the strain and scattering model. Our results show that the values of the electron velocity and the current in the strain model are higher than the respective values in the unstrained model, and the values of the velocity and the current in the ballistic channel model are higher than the respective values in the non-ballistic channel model. In the strain and scattering models, the effect of each carrier scattering mechanism on the performance of the Si- diodes is analyzed in the drain region. For the ballistic channel model, our results show that inter-valley optical phonon scattering improves device performance, whereas intra-valley acoustic phonon scattering degrades device performance. For the strain model, our results imply that the larger energy splitting of the strained Si could suppress the inter-valley phonon scattering rate. In conclusion, for the drain region, investigation of the strained-Si and scattering mechanisms are necessary, in order to improve the performance of nanoscale ballistic regime devices.
Intrinsic carrier concentration(ni) is one of the most important physical parameters for understanding the physics of strained Si and Si1-xGex materials as well as for evaluating the electrical properties of Si-based strained devices. Up to now, the report on quantitative results of intrinsic carrier concentration in strained Si and Si1-xGex materials has been still lacking. In this paper, by analyzing the band structure of strained Si and Si1-xGex materials, both the effective densities of the state near the top of valence band and the bottom of conduction band( Nc and Nv) at 218, 330 and 393 K and the intrinsic carrier concentration related to Ge fraction(x) at 300 K were systematically studied within the framework of KP theory and semiconductor physics. It is found that the intrinsic carrier concentration in strained Si(001) and Si1-xGex(001) and(101) materials at 300 K increases significantly with increasing Ge fraction(x), which provides valuable references to understand the Sibased strained device physics and design.
This paper presents the analytical modeling of subthreshold current and subthreshold swing of short- channel fully-depleted (FD) strained-Si-on-insulator (SSOI) MOSFETs having vertical Gaussian-like doping pro- file in the channel. The subthreshold current and subthreshold swing have been derived using the parabolic approx- imation method. In addition to the effect of strain on silicon layer, various other device parameters such as channel length (L), gate-oxide thickness (tox), strained-Si channel thickness (ts_Si), peak doping concentration (Np), project range (Rp) and straggle (op) of the Gaussian profile have been considered while predicting the device characteris- tics. The present work may help to overcome the degradation in subthreshold characteristics with strain engineering. These subthreshold current and swing models provide valuable information for strained-Si MOSFET design. Ac- curacy of the proposed models is verified using the commercially available ATLASTM, a two-dimensional (2D) device simulator from SILVACO.
The effect of substrate doping on the flatband and threshold voltages of a strained-Si/SiGe p metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor(pMOSFET) has been studied.By physically deriving the models of the flatband and threshold voltages,which have been validated by numerical simulation and experimental data,the shift in the plateau from the inversion region to the accumulation region as the substrate doping increases has been explained.The proposed model can provide a valuable reference to the designers of strained-Si devices and has been implemented in software for extracting the parameters of a strained-Si MOSFET.
In this study,the electron effective masses,including longitudinal,transverse,density-of-states and conductivity effective masses,have been systematically investigated in(001),(101) and(111) biaxially strained Si and Si1-xGex.It is found that the effect of strain on the longitudinal and transverse masses can be neglected,that the density-of-states masses in(001) and(110) biaxially strained Si and Si1-xGex materials decrease significantly with increasing Ge fraction(x),and that the conductivity masses along typical orientations in(001) and(110) strained Si and Si1-xGex.are obviously different from those in relaxed Si.The quantitative results obtained from this work may provide valuable theoretical references to understanding strained materials physics and studying conduction channel design related to stress and orientations in the strained devices.
SONG JianJunYANG ChaoZHANG HeMingHU HuiYongZHOU ChunYuWANG Bin