Surface Passivation in Empirical Tight Binding

Empirical tight binding (TB) methods are widely used in atomistic device simulations. Existing TB methods to passivate dangling bonds fall into two categories: 1) method that explicitly includes passivation atoms is limited to passivation with atoms and small molecules only and 2) method that implicitly incorporates passivation does not distinguish passivation atom types. This paper introduces an implicit passivation method that is applicable to any passivation scenario with appropriate parameters. This method is applied to a Si quantum well and a Si ultrathin body transistor oxidized with SiO2 in several oxidation configurations. Comparison with ab initio results and experiments verifies the presented method. Oxidation configurations that severely hamper the transistor performance are identified. It is also shown that the commonly used implicit H atom passivation overestimates the transistor performance.