High mobility strained p-channel germanium quantum well field effect transistor for low power (Vcc = 0.5 V) III–V CMOS applications

In this talk, we review recent research results (Pillarisetty et al., 2010) investigating the germanium quantum well field effect transistor (QWFET) for use as the p-channel device option for future low power (Vcc = 0.5V) III-V CMOS architecture. We demonstrate a high mobility Ge p-channel QWFET, with scaled TOXE = 14.5Å and mobility of 770 cm²/V*s at n_s =5×10¹² cm^-2. For TOXE <; 40 Å, this represents the highest hole mobility reported for any Ge device and is 4x higher than state-of-the-art strained silicon (Packan et al., 2008). Furthermore, at Vcc = 0.5V, the Ge QWFET exhibits 2x higher drive current at fixed Ioff than the best III-V (Radosavljevic et al., 2008) and germanium devices (Mitard et al., 2008) reported to date. These results suggest the Ge QWFET is a viable p-channel option for non-silicon CMOS.