Simulations of nanowire transistors: atomistic vs. effective mass models

The ballistic performance of electron transport in nanowire transistors is examined using a 10 orbital sp3d5s* atomistic tight-binding model for the description of the electronic structure, and the top-of-the-barrier semiclassical ballistic model for calculation of the transport properties of the transistors. The dispersion is self consistently computed with a 2D Poisson solution for the electrostatic potential in the cross section of the wire. The effective mass of the nanowire changes significantly from the bulk value under strong quantization, and effects such as valley splitting strongly lift the degeneracies of the valleys. These effects are pronounced even further under filling of the lattice with charge. The effective mass approximation is in good agreement with the tight binding model in terms of current– voltage characteristics only in certain cases. In general, for small diameter wires, the effective mass approximation fails.