Quantum effects in the simulation of conventional devices

Abstract

It is widely known that a fundamental role in the evolution of modern solid-state devices is played by scaling theories. The constant increase of the circuit complexity, the reduction of their dimensions and power consumption, in fact, is made possible mainly due to device shrinking. Of course, this progress wouldn’t have happened without the parallel evolution of semiconductor technologies, which, in turn, probably wouldn’t have progressed this much if the performance limits of MOS transistors had been reached sooner. Therefore, it is important to understand and try to predict these limits, possibly to avoid them circumventing their origin, ultimately to delay as much as possible the need of a different technology. To this purpose, from the theoretical side it is important to identify the correct physical frame in which investigations have to be performed, with the aim of bridging the gap between experiments and models, and, in essence, to be confident on the prediction ability of the simulation tools. In this paper we focus our attention on the modeling of quantum effects in MOS transistors, presenting some recent applications concerning quantum effects in MOSFETs.