$\Omega$ -Gated Silicon and Strained Silicon Nanowire Array Tunneling FETs

This letter presents experimental results on tunneling field-effect transistors featuring arrays of Ω-gated uniaxially strained and unstrained silicon nanowires. The gate control of a SiO₂/poly-Si gate stack is compared with a high-k/metal gate stack. Steep inverse subthreshold slopes down to 76 mV/dec and relatively high on-currents were achieved with the combination of high-k/metal gate and strained silicon nanowires. We observed negative differential conductance in the output characteristics, which we attribute to hot-carrier effects in the strong electric fields at the reverse-biased tunnel junction.