NWFET-LAB

Simulated Coulomb blockade diamonds in a 20nm Schottky-barrier MOSFET at 77K.

One of the major challenges for the realistic simulation of nanoscale field-effect transistors (FET) consists in an adequate description of the Coulomb interaction: A proper simulation approach has to account for the Coulomb interaction of a few fluctuating electrons and at the same time has to be able to describe non-equilibrium transport in an open nanosystem. For the simulation of quantum transport in realistic device systems, a mean-field approximation (e.g. Hartree potential) is commonly employed, rendering such an approach unable to describe few-electron Coulomb blockade effects. On the other hand, a full many-body approach is numerically unfeasible due to the large number of degrees of freedom in realistic device structures.
The main idea behind our multi-configurational self-consistent Green's function approach (MCSCG) [1,2,3] is to identify the small number of states that are responsible for the many-body Coulomb effects. In turn, these relevant states are treated by use of a many-body technique while the rest is handled by a conventional mean-field approximation. This approach allows for the systematic inclusion of few-electron Coulomb interaction effects for application-relevant conditions (see figure).

NWFET-Lab is an open source software project which is based on the MCSCG approach.
external link: nwfetlab

     

Copyright (c) 2010-2013 K. M. Indlekofer and J. Castelo. All rights reserved.

Further reading:
[1] Phys. Rev. B 72, 125308 (2005)
[2] Phys. Rev. B 74, 113310 (2006)
[3] IEEE Trans. Electron Dev. 54, 1502 (2007)