Influence of Band-Gap Opening on Ballistic Electron Transport in Bilayer Graphene and Graphene Nanoribbon FETs

摘要

Although a graphene is a zero-gap semiconductor, band-gap energy values up to several hundred millielectronvolts have been introduced by utilizing quantum–mechanical confinement in nanoribbon structures or symmetry breaking between two carbon layers in bilayer graphenes (BLGs). However, the opening of a band gap causes a significant reduction in carrier velocity due to the modulation of band structures in their low-energy spectra. In this paper, we study intrinsic effects of the band-gap opening on ballistic electron transport in graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and BLGs based on a computational approach, and discuss the ultimate device performances of FETs with those semiconducting graphene channels. We have shown that an increase in the external electric field in BLG-FETs to obtain a larger band-gap energy degrades substantially its electrical characteristics because of deacceleration of electrons due to a Mexican hat structure; therefore, GNR-FETs outperform in principle BLG-FETs.