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The effects of source doping concentration and doping gradient on the ON-state current of Si nanowire TFETs

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Abstract

The tunnel field-effect transistor (TFET) is considered a promising next-generation transistor due to its potentially limit-breaking low subthreshold swing and better immunity against short-channel effects. However, the low ON-state current (ION) of TFETs has been a critical problem. In this work, we investigated the effects of the source doping concentration and the source doping gradient (SDG) on the ION of n-type Si gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire (NW) TFETs using an ATLAS device simulator. Unexpectedly, we found that increasing the source doping concentration does not necessarily improve ION, especially for TFETs with a large SDG. Moreover, although reducing the SDG indeed increases ION, for TFETs with low source doping concentration (e.g., 1 × 1019 cm−3), the improvement in ION by reducing the SDG becomes insignificant.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) for providing computational and storage resources.

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  1. Electrical Engineering Department, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, 974-01, Taiwan

    Keng-Ming Liu & Yu-En Hsieh

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  1. Keng-Ming Liu
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Correspondence to Keng-Ming Liu.

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Liu, KM., Hsieh, YE. The effects of source doping concentration and doping gradient on the ON-state current of Si nanowire TFETs. J Comput Electron 22, 209–218 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10825-022-01995-6

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