Mobility of Circular and Elliptical Si Nanowire Transistors Using a Multi-Subband 1D Formalism

We have studied the impact of the cross-sectional shape on the electron mobility of n-type silicon nanowire transistors (NWTs). We have considered circular and elliptical cross-section NWTs including the most relevant multisubband scattering processes involving phonon, surface roughness, and impurity scattering. For this purpose, we use a flexible simulation framework, coupling 3D Poisson and 2D Schrödinger solvers with the semi-classical Kubo-Greenwood formalism. Moreover, we consider cross-section dependent effective masses calculated from tight binding simulations. Our results show significant mobility improvement in the elliptic NWTs in comparison to the circular one for both 100 and 110 transport directions.