Impact of precisely positioned dopants on the performance of an ultimate silicon nanowire transistor: a full three-dimensional NEGF simulation study

In this paper, we report the first systematic study of quantum transport simulation of the impact of precisely positioned dopants on the performance of ultimately scaled gate-all-around silicon nanowire transistors (NWTs) designed for digital circuit applications. Due to strong inhomogeneity of the selfconsistent electrostatic potential, a full 3-D real-space nonequilibrium Green function formalism is used. The simulations are carried out for an n-channel NWT with 2.2 × 2.2 nm2 cross section and 6-nm channel length, where the locations of the precisely arranged dopants in the source-drain extensions and in the channel region have been varied. The individual dopants act as localized scatters, and hence, impact of the electron transport is directly correlated to the position of the single dopants. As a result, a large variation in the ON-current and a modest variation of the subthreshold slope are observed in the ID-VG characteristics when comparing devices with microscopically different discrete dopant configurations. The variations of the current-voltage characteristics are analyzed with reference to the behavior of the transmission coefficients

Palladium gates for reproducible quantum dots in silicon

We replace the established aluminium gates for the formation of quantum dots in silicon with gates made from palladium. We study the morphology of both aluminium and palladium gates with transmission electron microscopy. The native aluminium oxide is found to be formed all around the aluminium gates, which could lead to the formation of unintentional dots. Therefore, we report on a novel fabrication route that replaces aluminium and its native oxide by palladium with atomic-layer-deposition-grown aluminium oxide. Using this approach, we show the formation of low-disorder gate-defined quantum dots, which are reproducibly fabricated. Furthermore, palladium enables us to further shrink the gate design, allowing us to perform electron transport measurements in the few-electron regime in devices comprising only two gate layers, a major technological advancement. It remains to be seen, whether the introduction of palladium gates can improve the excellent results on electron and nuclear spin qubits defined with an aluminium gate stack