Interplay of self-heating and short-range coulomb interactions due to traps in a 10 nm channel length nanowire transistor

Random telegraph noise fluctuations (RTF) manifest themselves as fluctuations in the transistor threshold voltage and drive (ON) current. RTF is caused by random trapping and detrapping of charges lying at the inversion channel of the device close to the oxide-semiconductor interface [1]. Traditionally, RTF were important only in analog design at low frequencies [2]. However, as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) is scaling into the sub-100 nm regime, the effect of RTF as well as its variability is no longer negligible, even in digital design [3]. In fact, we have illustrated in past work that the presence of a single trap at the source end of the channel in a nanowire transistor can significantly degrade the on current [4]. In these simulations, we have utilized a 3D Monte Carlo device simulator in which the short-range portion of the Coulomb interaction was accounted for by a real-space molecular dynamics (MD) model, the details of which can be found in Ref. [5]. The model accounts for both the short-range and the long-range components of the Coulomb interaction and has been applied in many other studies [6].