Temperature Dependence of Carrier Transport of a Silicon Nanowire Schottky-Barrier Field-Effect Transistor

In this paper, temperature dependence of the characteristics of a silicon nanowire (SiNW) Schottky-barrier (SB) MOSFET device has been investigated in detail. Palladium or titanium source and drain SiNW MOSFETS integrated with an Al₂O₃/TaN/Ta gate stack have been fabricated and characterized at different temperatures. Results show that SB SiNW MOSFETs operate with different principles, compared to conventional MOSFETs. From the I_ON and transconductance variation with temperature, it is found that the device operation is dominated by carrier injection at the interface of the source and channel rather than the carrier transport inside the NW channel. Furthermore, this carrier injection is determined by the competition between SB tunneling and thermionic emission. Therefore, the SB height and width play an important role in SB SiNW mosfet operation, and effective barrier height has been extracted based on I_DS-V _GS characteristics at different temperatures. In addition, the profile of SB at the source/channel interface was analyzed with a qualitative analysis of the subthreshold swing.