Hesham Ghoneim
Performance improvement by device scaling has been the prevailing method in the semiconductor industry over the past four decades. However, current silicon transistor technology is approaching a fundamental limit where scaling does not improve device performance. As the density of number of devices increases a rise in dynamic and especially static power dissipation is ever more present, making this the biggest issue in microelectronics today. Planar silicon devices are therefore already being replaced by multiple-gate architectures and will be replaced by new channel materials and new switching mechanisms during the next 10 years. A means to decrease the threshold and supply voltage and, therefore minimizing power dissipation, is to employ devices which exhibit a steeper slope than the MOSFET limit of 60 mV/dec at room temperature. The Tunnel FET promises steep turn-on characteristics and low leakage currents as compared to MOSFETs which make it attractive for low-power operation. A great deal of work over the past years has been done to boost device performance of Tunnel FETs by combining ultimate wrap-gate architectures, incorporation of III/V materials and band engineering for hetero-tunnel junctions. The latter is seen as an ideal route towards achieving high drive currents and steep sub-threshold slopes at low supply voltages. This thesis investigates both Si Tunnel FETs and the route towards heterostructure Tunnel FETs, but also the technological challenges to achieve these device structures. The first part of this work deals with vapor-liquid-solid grown silicon in-situ doped n+-i-p nanowire Tunnel FETs in a lateral geometry, where the influence of the gate dielectric, i.e., SiO2 or HfO2, on device performance is investigated along with the study of low-temperature behavior. The devices having the strongest gate coupling due to the high-κ gate oxide HfO2 are shown to exhibit the best device performance as compared with the SiO2 gate stack. A vertical process for Si FETs is developed and improved to obtain a fully wrap-gate geometry. It is adaptable to different material systems and is the basis for the ongoing work on InAs-on-Si nanowire Tunnel FETs. Improved performance for these heterostructure devices requires in particular high doping concentrations as well as abrupt doping profiles to achieve high tunnel currents. Therefore, the second part focuses on the InAs material system and specifically the study of dopant incorporation. Doping is done in-situ using different precursors during growth. The InAs nanowires are grown in SiO2 mask openings on 〈111〉 Si substrates in a metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy process. The effect of the dopants and growth parameters on radial and vertical growth rates, wire morphology and resistivity is investigated. A method utilizing the measured Seebeck coefficient of the InAs nanowires to extract doping densities without the need of assuming a mobility value is presented. Two other reference methods where I-V characteristics of homo-and heterojunction InAs tunnel diodes are fitted by TCAD simulations confirm this approach. Doping densities ranging from 1·1017 cm−3 to 7.1·1019 cm−3 were achieved which is comparable to the highest doping concentration reported in bulk InAs. Furthermore, single vertical pn+-junctions are fabricated by growing n-type InAs nanowires on p-type InAs substrates, which show high tunnel current densities of 500 kA/cm2 at 0.3 V reverse bias. In the forward direction, negative differential resistance is obtained below 200 K, which is the characteristic feature of an Esaki diode.
EPFL2012
