Hot carriers in silicon surface inversion layers

Calculations of the carrier mobility of electrons and holes vs the electrical field strength E are presented. The calculations have been performed based on a Maxwellian distribution and taking into account a repopulation of carriers among different valleys in the case of n-channel silicon inversion layers. The energy loss of the carriers to the lattice and the drift velocity or mobility are treated as two dimensional. Formulas for the energy loss are presented for both high and very low temperatures considering scattering by optical and acoustical phonons. The calculations are compared with experimental values given by Fang and Fowler and by Sato et al. Good agreement is found for the high-temperature case using coupling constants as given by Sah et al. Quite large differences between theory and experiment appear at very low temperatures. The origin of these differences is discussed in a final section.