arXiv subjects

Gianluca Fiori

Publications and source records attributed to Gianluca Fiori.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

First principle investigation of Tunnel FET based on nanoribbons from topological two-dimensional material

We explore nanoribbons from topological two-dimensional stanene as channel material in tunnel field effect transistors. This novel technological option offers the possibility to build pure one-dimensional (1D) channel devices (comprised of a 1D chain of atoms) due to localized states in correspondence of the nanoribbon edges. The investigation is based on first-principle calculations and multi-scale transport simulations to assess devices performance against industry requirements and their robustness with respect to technological issues like line edge roughness, detrimental for nanoribbons. We will show that edges states are robust with respect to the presence of non-idealities (e.g., atoms vacancies at the edges), and that 1D-channel TFETs exhibit interesting potential for digital applications and room for optimization in order to improve the Ion/Ioff at the levels required by the ITRS, while opening a path for the exploration of new device concepts at the ultimate scaling limits.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2018

Transistor concepts based on lateral heterostructures of metallic and semiconducting phases of MoS$_2$

In this paper we propose two transistor concepts based on lateral heterostructures of monolayer MoS$_2$, composed of adjacent regions of 1T (metallic) and 2H (semiconducting) phases, inspired by recent research showing the possibility to obtain such heterostructures by electron beam irradiation. The first concept, the lateral heterostructure field-effect transistor, exhibits potential of better performance with respect to the foreseen evolution of CMOS technology, both for high performance and low power applications. Performance potential has been evaluated by means of detailed multi-scale materials and device simulations. The second concept, the planar barristor, also exhibits potential competitive performance with CMOS, and an improvement of orders of magnitude in terms of the main figures of merit with respect to the recently proposed vertical barristor.

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arXiv2018

Quantum engineering of transistors based on 2D materials heterostructures

Quantum engineering entails atom by atom design and fabrication of electronic devices. This innovative technology that unifies materials science and device engineering has been fostered by the recent progress in the fabrication of vertical and lateral heterostructures of two-dimensional materials and by the assessment of the technology potential via computational nanotechnology. But how close are we to the possibility of practical realisation of the next generation atomically thin transistors? In this perspective we analyse the outlook and the challenges of quantum- engineered transistors using heterostructures of two-dimensional materials against the benchmark of silicon technology and its foreseeable evolution in terms of potential performance and manufacturability. Transistors based on lateral heterostructures emerge as the most promising option from a performance point of view, even if heterostructure formation and control are in the initial technology development stage.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2017

Growth-Induced Strain in Chemical Vapor Deposited Monolayer MoS2: Experimental and Theoretical Investigation

Monolayer molybdenum disulphide (MoS$_2$) is a promising two-dimensional (2D) material for nanoelectronic and optoelectronic applications. The large-area growth of MoS$_2$ has been demonstrated using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in a wide range of deposition temperatures from 600 °C to 1000 °C. However, a direct comparison of growth parameters and resulting material properties has not been made so far. Here, we present a systematic experimental and theoretical investigation of optical properties of monolayer MoS$_2$ grown at different temperatures. Micro-Raman and photoluminescence (PL) studies reveal observable inhomogeneities in optical properties of the as-grown single crystalline grains of MoS$_2$. Close examination of the Raman and PL features clearly indicate that growth-induced strain is the main source of distinct optical properties. We carry out density functional theory calculations to describe the interaction of growing MoS$_2$ layers with the growth substrate as the origin of strain. Our work explains the variation of band gap energies of CVD-grown monolayer MoS$_2$, extracted using PL spectroscopy, as a function of deposition temperature. The methodology has general applicability to model and predict the influence of growth conditions on strain in 2D materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2016

Performance of arsenene and antimonene double-gate MOSFETs from first principles

In the race towards high-performance ultra-scaled devices, two-dimensional materials offer an alternative paradigm thanks to their atomic thickness suppressing short-channel effects. It is thus urgent to study the most promising candidates in realistic configurations, and here we present detailed multiscale simulations of field-effect transistors based on arsenene and antimonene monolayers as channels. The accuracy of first-principles approaches in describing electronic properties is combined with the efficiency of tight-binding Hamiltonians based on maximally-localised Wannier functions to compute the transport properties of the devices. These simulations provide for the first time estimates on the upper limits for the electron and hole mobilities in the Takagi's approximation, including spin-orbit and multi-valley effects, and demonstrate that ultra-scaled devices in the sub-10 nm scale show a performance that is compliant with industry requirements.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2014

Heterojunction Hybrid Devices from Vapor Phase Grown MoS$_{2}$

We investigate a vertically-stacked hybrid photodiode consisting of a thin n-type molybdenum disulfide (MoS$_{2}$) layer transferred onto p-type silicon. The fabrication is scalable as the MoS$_{2}$ is grown by a controlled and tunable vapor phase sulfurization process. The obtained large-scale p-n heterojunction diodes exhibit notable photoconductivity which can be tuned by modifying the thickness of the MoS$_{2}$ layer. The diodes have a broad spectral response due to direct and indirect band transitions of the nanoscale MoS$_{2}$. Further, we observe a blue-shift of the spectral response into the visible range. The results are a significant step towards scalable fabrication of vertical devices from two-dimensional materials and constitute a new paradigm for materials engineering.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2013

Engineering interband tunneling in nanowires with diamond cubic or zincblende crystalline structure based on atomistic modeling

We present an investigation in the device parameter space of band-to-band tunneling in nanowires with a diamond cubic or zincblende crystalline structure. Results are obtained from quantum transport simulations based on Non-Equilibrium Green's functions with a tight-binding atomistic Hamiltonian. Interband tunneling is extremely sensitive to the longitudinal electric field, to the nanowire cross section, through the gap, and to the material. We have derived an approximate analytical expression for the transmission probability based on WKB theory and on a proper choice of the effective interband tunneling mass, which shows good agreement with results from atomistic quantum simulation.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2013

Atomistic Boron-Doped Graphene Field Effect Transistors: A Route towards Unipolar Characteristics

We report fully quantum simulations of realistic models of boron-doped graphene-based field effect transistors, including atomistic details based on DFT calculations. We show that the self-consistent solution of the three-dimensional (3D) Poisson and Schrödinger equations with a representation in terms of a tight-binding Hamiltonian manages to accurately reproduce the DFT results for an isolated boron-doped graphene nanoribbon. Using a 3D Poisson/Schrödinger solver within the Non-Equilibrium Green's Functions (NEGF) formalism, self-consistent calculations of the gate-screened scattering potentials induced by the boron impurities have been performed, allowing the theoretical exploration of the tunability of transistor characteristics. The boron-doped graphene transistors are found to approach unipolar behavior as the boron concentration is increased, and by tuning the density of chemical dopants the electron-hole transport asymmetry can be finely adjusted. Correspondingly, the onset of a mobility gap in the device is observed. Although the computed asymmetries are not sufficient to warrant proper device operation, our results represent an initial step in the direction of improved transfer characteristics and, in particular, the developed simulation strategy is a powerful new tool for modeling doped graphene nanostructures.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2012

Tunneling properties of vertical heterostructures of multilayer hexagonal boron nitride and graphene

We use first-principle density functional theory (DFT) to study the transport properties of single and double barrier heterostructures realized by stacking multilayer h-BN or BC$_{2}$N, and graphene films between graphite leads. The heterostructures are lattice matched. The considered single barrier systems consist of layers of up to five h-BN or BC$_{2}$N monoatomic layers (Bernal stacking) between graphite electrodes. The transmission probability of an h-BN barrier exhibits two unusual behaviors: it is very low also in a classically allowed energy region, due to a crystal momentum mismatch between states in graphite and in the dielectric layer, and it is only weakly dependent on energy in the h-BN gap, because the imaginary part of the crystal momentum of h-BN is almost independent of energy. The double barrier structures consist of h-BN films separated by up to three graphene layers. We show that already five layers of h-BN strongly suppress the transmission between graphite leads, and that resonant tunneling cannot be observed because the energy dispersion relation cannot be decoupled in a vertical and a transversal component.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2011

Drift velocity peak and negative differential mobility in high field transport in graphene nanoribbons explained by numerical simulations

We present numerical simulations of high field transport in both suspended and deposited armchair graphene nanoribbon (A-GNR) on HfO2 substrate. Drift velocity in suspended GNR does not saturate at high electric field (F), but rather decreases, showing a maximum for F=10 kV/cm. Deposition on HfO2 strongly degrades the drift velocity by up to a factor of 10 with respect to suspended GNRs in the low-field regime, whereas at high fields drift velocity approaches the intrinsic value expected in suspended GNRs. Even in the assumption of perfect edges, the obtained mobility is far behind what expected in two-dimensional graphene, and is further reduced by surface optical phonons.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2011

Ab-Initio Simulations of Deformation Potentials and Electron Mobility in Chemically Modified Graphene and two-dimensional hexagonal Boron-Nitride

We present an ab-initio study of electron mobility and electron-phonon coupling in chemically modified graphene, considering fluorinated and hydrogenated graphene at different percentage coverage. Hexagonal Boron Carbon Nitrogen (h-BCN) is also investigated due the increased interest shown by the research community towards this material. In particular, the Deformation Potentials are computed by means of Density Functional Theory (DFT), while the carrier mobility is obtained according to the Takagi model (S. Takagi, A. Toriumi, and H. Tango, IEEE Trans. Electr. Dev. 41, 2363 (1994)). We will show that graphene with a reduced degree of hydrogenation can compete, in terms of mobility, with silicon technology.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2011

Strong mobility degradation in ideal graphene nanoribbons due to phonon scattering

We investigate the low-field phonon-limited mobility in armchair graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) using full-band electron and phonon dispersion relations. We show that lateral confinement suppresses the intrinsic mobility of GNRs to values typical of common bulk semiconductors, and very far from the impressive experiments on 2D graphene. Suspended GNRs with a width of 1 nm exhibit a mobility close to 500 cm^2/Vs at room temperature, whereas if the same GNRs are deposited on HfO2 mobility is further reduced to about 60 cm^2/Vs due to surface phonons. We also show the occurrence of polaron formation, leading to band gap renormalization of ~118 meV for 1 nm-wide armchair GNRs.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2011

Atomistic investigation of low-field mobility in graphene nanoribbons

We have investigated the main scattering mechanisms affecting mobility in graphene nanoribbons using detailed atomistic simulations. We have considered carrier scattering due to acoustic and optical phonons, edge roughness, single defects, and ionized impurities, and we have defined a methodology based on simulations of statistically meaningful ensembles of nanoribbon segments. Edge disorder heavily affects mobility at room temperature in narrower nanoribbons, whereas charged impurities and phonons are hardly the limiting factors. Results are favorably compared to the few experiments available in the literature.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2010

Simulation of hydrogenated graphene Field-Effect Transistors through a multiscale approach

In this work, we present a performance analysis of Field Effect Transistors based on recently fabricated 100% hydrogenated graphene (the so-called graphane) and theoretically predicted semi-hydrogenated graphene (i.e. graphone). The approach is based on accurate calculations of the energy bands by means of GW approximation, subsequently fitted with a three-nearest neighbor (3NN) sp3 tight-binding Hamiltonian, and finally used to compute ballistic transport in transistors based on functionalized graphene. Due to the large energy gap, the proposed devices have many of the advantages provided by one-dimensional graphene nanoribbon FETs, such as large Ion and Ion/Ioff ratios, reduced band-to-band tunneling, without the corresponding disadvantages in terms of prohibitive lithography and patterning requirements for circuit integration.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2010

Enhanced shot noise in carbon nanotube field-effect transistors

We predict shot noise enhancement in defect-free carbon nanotube field-effect transistors through a numerical investigation based on the self-consistent solution of the Poisson and Schrodinger equations within the non-equilibrium Green functions formalism, and on a Monte Carlo approach to reproduce injection statistics. Noise enhancement is due to the correlation between trapping of holes from the drain into quasi-bound states in the channel and thermionic injection of electrons from the source, and can lead to an appreciable Fano factor of 1.22 at room temperature.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2010

Statistical theory of shot noise in quasi-1D Field Effect Transistors in the presence of electron-electron interaction

We present an expression for the shot noise power spectral density in quasi-one dimensional conductors electrostatically controlled by a gate electrode, that includes the effects of Coulomb interaction and of Pauli exclusion among charge carriers. In this sense, our expression extends the well known Landauer-Buttiker noise formula to include the effect of Coulomb interaction through induced fluctuations in the device potential. Our approach is based on the introduction of statistical properties of the scattering matrix and on a second-quantization many-body description. From a quantitative point of view, statistical properties are obtained by means of Monte Carlo simulations on a ensemble of different configurations of injected states, requiring the solution of the Poisson-Schrodinger equation on a three-dimensional grid, with the non-equilibrium Green functions formalism. In a series of example, we show that failure to consider the effects of Coulomb interaction on noise leads to a gross overestimation of the noise spectrum of quasi-one dimensional devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2010

Shot noise suppression in quasi one-dimensional Field Effect Transistors

We present a novel method for the evaluation of shot noise in quasi one-dimensional field-effect transistors, such as those based on carbon nanotubes and silicon nanowires. The method is derived by using a statistical approach within the second quantization formalism and allows to include both the effects of Pauli exclusion and Coulomb repulsion among charge carriers. In this way it extends Landauer-Buttiker approach by explicitly including the effect of Coulomb repulsion on noise. We implement the method through the self-consistent solution of the 3D Poisson and transport equations within the NEGF framework and a Monte Carlo procedure for populating injected electron states. We show that the combined effect of Pauli and Coulomb interactions reduces shot noise in strong inversion down to 23 % of the full shot noise for a gate overdrive of 0.4 V, and that neglecting the effect of Coulomb repulsion would lead to an overestimation of noise up to 180 %.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2009

A semi-analytical model of Bilayer Graphene Field Effect Transistor

Bilayer graphene has the very interesting property of an energy gap tunable with the vertical electric field. We propose an analytical model for a bilayer-graphene field-effect transistor, suitable for exploring the design parameter space and to find a device structure with promising performance in terms of transistor operation. Our model, based on the effective mass approximation and ballistic transport assumptions, takes into account bilayer-graphene tunable gap and self polarization, and includes all band-to-band tunneling current components, which are shown to represent the major limitation to transistor operation, because the limited achievable energy gap is not sufficient to obtain a large Ion/Ioff ratio.

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