Tight-binding and effective mass modeling of armchair carbon nanoribbon FETs

We show that a ballistic quantum transport model based on the effective mass approximation can fairly well describe the I–V characteristics of armchair graphene nanoribbon FETs at all bias conditions, including regimes dominated by direct or band-to-band tunneling, provided first-order non-parabolic corrections be included in the simulation. This is achieved by means of an energy (position) dependent effective mass. The analysis is supported by comparisons with an atomistic tight-binding model.