Simulation of Sub-Micron GaAs MESFETs for Microwave Control

Abstract

Studying the scaling of microwave control MESFETs in the submicron regime cannot be done accurately using simplified models of electron transport such as drift-diffusion. Non-stationary effects need to be incorporated into the model, and this is most conveniently done by solving the semi-classical BTE. The use of the conventional Monte Carlo technique to solve the BTE suffers from a drawback in that the simulation needs to be run afresh for any change in the device geometry or bias conditions. Using such a technique to study device scaling may therefore be computationally demanding.

Based on the above considerations, our choice for a BTE solver is the Basis Function technique of Rees. This technique promises to be computationally efficient because it stores all scattering information for a given material in a pre-computed data-base. In this paper, we shall briefly describe the technique and its advantages, especially vis-a-vis the modeling of GaAs Control MESFETs in the “conducting state”. Some preliminary results of our numerical model for the “Local-effect” and “Flux” operators will also be discussed.