A pseudopotential method for investigating the surface roughness effect in ultrathin body transistors

Abstract

An atomistic method based on the diffraction pseudopotential model is established, for investigating the surface roughness (SR) effect in ultrathin body double-gate metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors. The scattering of electrons due to atoms and vacancies responsible for roughness results from a three-dimensional effective field, and its planar components provide essentially roughness scattering, while a vertical effective field is the source of scattering in the method developed in which roughness is treated as a semiclassical barrier fluctuation. The present model involves a stronger effect on mobility than the previously developed one and results in an excellent fit, as regards mobility, to the reported experimental data. The extracted SR parameter also matches the observed value. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd.