Study of Quantum Mechanical Effects in Deep Submicron Grating-Gate Field EffectTransistors

摘要

This research program investigates the effect of extreme submicron and sub-100 nmspatial modulation of the electrostatic potential on the transport of electrons in heterojunction semiconductor devices. The test vehicle is the so-called periodic-gate FET (PGFET), with gate consisting of either a grating or a grid, of 200 nm periodicity. When electrons are made to move in a direction perpendicular to the potential modulation, i.e., perpendicular to the grating of along a grid axis, they exhibit a surface superlattice (SSL) effect. When moving along the potential modulation of a grating, electrons are restricted to only one degree of freedom and thus constitute a quasi-one-dimensional (QID) quantum system. Grid-gate FET's have been found to exhibit substantially stronger SSL behavior than their grating-gate counterparts. Electron transport in quantized and spatially periodic systems have been studied theoretically and new insights and quantitative calculations have been obtained. (Author)