Performance study of strained III-V materials for ultra-thin body transistor applications

A comprehensive description of band gap and effective masses of III-V semiconductor bulk and ultra-thin body (UTB) structures under realistic biaxial and uniaxial strain is given using numerical simulations from four different electronic structure codes. The consistency between the different tools is discussed in depth. The nearest neighbor sp3d5s∗ empirical tight-binding model is found to reproduce most trends obtained by ab initio Density Functional Theory calculations at much lower computational cost. This model is then used to investigate the impact of strain on the ON-state performance of realistic In0.53Ga0.47As UTB MOSFETs coupled with an efficient method based on the well-known top-of-the-barrier model. While the relative variation of effective masses between unstrained and strained cases seems promising at first, the calculations predict no more than 2% performance improvement on drive currents from any of the studied strain configurations.