17 research outputs found
Quantum Transport in a Nanosize Silicon-on-Insulator Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor
An approach is developed for the determination of the current flowing through
a nanosize silicon-on-insulator (SOI) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect
transistors (MOSFET). The quantum mechanical features of the electron transport
are extracted from the numerical solution of the quantum Liouville equation in
the Wigner function representation. Accounting for electron scattering due to
ionized impurities, acoustic phonons and surface roughness at the Si/SiO2
interface, device characteristics are obtained as a function of a channel
length. From the Wigner function distributions, the coexistence of the
diffusive and the ballistic transport naturally emerges. It is shown that the
scattering mechanisms tend to reduce the ballistic component of the transport.
The ballistic component increases with decreasing the channel length.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, E-mail addresses: [email protected]
Back-hopping in Spin-Transfer-Torque switching of perpendicularly magnetized tunnel junctions
We analyse the phenomenon of back-hopping in spin-torque induced switching of
the magnetization in perpendicularly magnetized tunnel junctions. The analysis
is based on single-shot time-resolved conductance measurements of the
pulse-induced back-hopping. Studying several material variants reveals that the
back-hopping is a feature of the nominally fixed system of the tunnel junction.
The back-hopping is found to proceed by two sequential switching events that
lead to a final state P' of conductance close to --but distinct from-- that of
the conventional parallel state. The P' state does not exist at remanence. It
generally relaxes to the conventional antiparallel state if the current is
removed. The P' state involves a switching of the sole spin-polarizing part of
the fixed layers. The analysis of literature indicates that back-hopping occurs
only when the spin-polarizing layer is too weakly coupled to the rest of the
fixed system, which justifies a posteriori the mitigation strategies of
back-hopping that were implemented empirically in spin-transfer-torque magnetic
random access memories.Comment: submitted to Phys Rev.
Resistivity scaling in metallic thin films and nanowires due to grain boundary and surface roughness scattering
A modeling approach, based on an analytical solution of the semiclassical multi-subband Boltzmann transport equation, is presented to study resistivity scaling in metallic thin films and nanowires due to grain boundary and surface roughness scattering. While taking into account the detailed statistical properties of grains, roughness and barrier material as well as the metallic band structure and quantum mechanical aspects of scattering and confinement, the model does not rely on phenomenological fitting parameters
Design and simulation of plasmonic interference-based majority gate
Major obstacles in current CMOS technology, such as the interconnect bottleneck and thermal heat management, can be overcome by employing subwavelength-scaled light in plasmonic waveguides and devices. In this work, a plasmonic structure that implements the majority (MAJ) gate function is designed and thoroughly studied through simulations. The structure consists of three merging waveguides, serving as the MAJ gate inputs. The information of the logic signals is encoded in the phase of transmitted surface plasmon polaritons (SPP). SPPs are excited at all three inputs and the phase of the output SPP is determined by the MAJ of the input phases. The operating dimensions are identified and the functionality is verified for all input combinations. This is the first reported simulation of a plasmonic MAJ gate and thus contributes to the field of optical computing at the nanoscale
Long-wavelength, confined optical phonons in InAs nanowires probed by Raman spectroscopy
Strongly confined nano-systems, such as one-dimensional nanowires, feature deviations in their
structural, electronic and optical properties from the corresponding bulk. In this work, we investigate the
behavior of long-wavelength, optical phonons in vertical arrays of InAs nanowires by Raman spectroscopy. We
attribute the main changes in the spectral features to thermal anharmonicity, due to temperature effects, and
rule out the contribution of quantum confinement and Fano resonances. We also observe the appearance of
surface optical modes, whose details allow for a quantitative, independent estimation of the nanowire
diameter. The results shed light onto the mechanisms of lineshape change in low-dimensional InAs
nanostructures, and are useful to help tailoring their electronic and vibrational properties for novel
functionalities
Nanowire transistors without junctions
All existing transistors are based on the use of semiconductor junctions formed by introducing dopant atoms into the semiconductor material. As the distance between junctions in modern devices drops below 10 nm, extraordinarily high doping concentration gradients become necessary. Because of the laws of diffusion and the statistical nature of the distribution of the doping atoms, such junctions represent an increasingly difficult challenge for the semiconductor industry. Here, we propose and demonstrate a new type of transistor in which there are no junctions and no doping concentration gradients. These devices have full CMOS functionality and are made using silicon nanowires. They have near-ideal subthreshold slope, extremely low leakage currents, and less degradation of mobility with gate voltage and temperature than classical transistors