Impact of Quantum Confinement on Subthreshold Swing and Electrostatic Integrity of Ultra-Thin-Body GeOI and InGaAs-OI n-MOSFETs

This paper investigates the electrostatic integrity (EI) of ultra-thin-body (UTB) germanium-on-insulator (GeOI) and InGaAs-OI n-MOSFETs considering quantum confinement (QC) using a derived analytical solution of Schrdinger equation verified with TCAD numerical simulation. Although the electron conduction path of the high-mobility channel device can be far from the frontgate interface due to high channel permittivity, our study indicates that the quantum confinement effect can move the carrier centroid toward the frontgate and, therefore, improve the subthreshold swing (SS) of the UTB device. Since InGaAs, Ge, and Si channels exhibit different degrees of quantum confinement due to different quantization effective mass, the impact of quantum confinement has to be considered when one-to-one comparisons among UTB InGaAs-OI, GeOI, and SOI MOSFETs regarding the subthreshold swing and electrostatic integrity are made. © 2011 IEEE.