A Computational Exploration of Lateral Channel Engineering to Enhance MOSFET Performance

Techniques to engineer a MOSFET’s channel in the lateral direction have been proposed to enhance the device performance. In this paper, we present a thorough simulation study to evaluate the feasibility of such lateral engineering techniques. Each of three types of transport equations, the ballistic Boltzmann, drift-diffusion and nonequilibrium Green’s function with scattering, is solved self-consistently with 2-D Poisson equation to simulate device performance under both the ballistic and dissipative transport conditions. The results indicate that even if highly idealized device structures are assumed, only limited improvements over the conventional MOSFETs can be achieved by the channel engineering techniques. These results don’t conflict with reports of large on-current improvements using the lateral channel engineering, because those comparisons with the conventional MOSFETs were done without specifying a common off-current.