Improved carrier injection in gate-all-around Schottky barrier silicon nanowire field-effect transistors

This letter presents the performance improvement of Schottky barrier metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor by employing gate-all-around (GAA) Si-nanowire (SiNW) structure. Without employing any barrier lowering technique, the mid-band-gap Ni-silicide Schottky barrier transistors demonstrated excellent performance and achieved subthreshold slope of similar to 86 mV/decade and on-current of 19 mu A/mu m on a 12.5 nm SiNW, and subthreshold slope of similar to 79 mV/decade and on-current of 207 mu A/mu m on a 4 nm diameter SiNW. Assisted with simulation, we show that this improvement can be attributed to the strong reduction in the Schottky barrier thickness as a result of the better gate control of GAA SiNW structure. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics.