Improved carrier injection in gate-all-around Schottky barrier silicon nanowire field-effect transistors

This letter presents the performance improvement of Schottky barrier metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor by employing gate-all-around (GAA) Si-nanowire (SiNW) structure. Without employing any barrier lowering technique, the mid-band-gap Ni-silicide Schottky barrier transistors demonstrated excellent performance and achieved subthreshold slope of ∼ 86 mV / decade and on-current of 19 μ A / μ m on a 12.5 nm SiNW, and subthreshold slope of ∼ 79 mV / decade and on-current of 207 μ A / μ m on a 4 nm diameter SiNW. Assisted with simulation, we show that this improvement can be attributed to the strong reduction in the Schottky barrier thickness as a result of the better gate control of GAA SiNW structure.