Monte Carlo simulation of hot-carrier transport in real semiconductor devices

A self-consistent Monte Carlo-Poisson device-simulation program has been used to study hot-carrier transport in a variety of ‘small’ devices (submicron Si MOSFETs, thin-base Si bipolar transistors, GaAs MESFETs). In all of these devices, provided realistically highly-doped contact regions are included , the long-range intercarrier Coulomb interaction appears to play a major role: via electron-plasma energy losses in short channel MOSFETs, via correlation-energy effects in the emitter of Si n - p - n bipolar transistors. Moreover, in the quasi-ballistic regime of very small devices realistically scaled and driven at realistically large biases , band-structure effects dominate to such an extent that the device behavior is explained better by the medium-high energy similarities of the band-structure of zinc-blend semiconductors than by the more familiar low-energy concepts (e.g., mobility and effective-mass). We will argue that realistic technological assumption about ‘faster(?)’ GaAs-based, logic-circuit-oriented MOSFETs may actually leave untouched the supremacy of the Si-based technology in the submicrometer-range.