AMaSiS 2018 Workshop: Abstracts

Hydrodynamic modeling of electron transport in silicon quantum wires

Orazio Muscato

University of Catania, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science

Silicon nanowires (SiNW) are quasi-one-dimensional structures in which the electrons are spatially confined in two directions, and they are free to move along the axis of the wire. The spatial confinement is governed by the Schrödinger-Poisson system, which must be coupled to the transport in the free motion direction. For devices with the characteristic length of a few tens of nanometers, the transport of the electrons along the axis of the wire can be considered semiclassical, and it can be dealt with the multi-sub-band Boltzmann transport equations (MBTE). By taking the moments of the MBTE, a hydrodynamic model has been formulated, where explicit closure relations for the fluxes and production terms (i.e., the moments on the collisional operator) are obtained by means of the Maximum Entropy principle of Extended Thermodynamics, including the scattering of electrons with phonons, impurities and surface roughness scattering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

By using this model, one can deal with thermoelectric effects as well as evaluate in a very efficient way, the low-field electron mobility which is one of the most important parameters for benchmarking different technology options and device architectures.

Acknowledgments: We acknowledge the support of the project ”Modellistica, simulazione e ottimizzazione del trasporto di cariche in strutture a bassa dimensionalità”, Università degli Studi di Catania - Piano della Ricerca 2016/2018 Linea di intervento 2.