Tunneling Leakage Current of Gate-All-Around

Nanowire Junctionless Transistor with an Auxiliary

Gate
Linyuan Zhao1,2, Wenjie Chen1,2, Renrong Liang1,2*, Yu Liu1,2, and Jun Xu1,2*
1.Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2.Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Beijing, China
* Renrong Liang: liangrr@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn and Jun Xu: junxu@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract—Gate-all-around nanowire junctionless transistor

with an auxiliary gate (AG-GAAJLT) is proposed to restrain II. DEVICE STRUCTURE AND SIMULATION SETUP
the band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) resulted in off-state The schematic of the proposed AG-GAAJLT is
leakage current in junctionless transistor. The device is illustrated in Fig. 1(a). The cross sections of it and the C-
investigated through three-dimensional (3D) numerical GAAJLT are demonstrated for comparison in Fig. 1(b). The
simulations. Results show that the AG-GAAJLT has seven
channel, source and drain are uniformly n-type doped. Two
orders of magnitude lower off-state current compared with the
isolated metal gates are formed outside the dielectric layer.
conventional gate-all-around junctionless transistor (C-
GAAJLT). The effects of auxiliary gate voltage (VAG) and The gate near the source region is control gate, and the other
distance between control gate and auxiliary gate (dG-AG) are one is auxiliary gate. Both of them could be fabricated
studied, and the optimizations of VAG and dG-AG are presented. simultaneously by the same metal material, which reduces
This work provides a new method to solve the BTBT in the difficulty of process. The parameters used in our
GAAJLT. simulations are listed in table I.
The device simulations are carried out by Sentaurus
Keywords—Gate-all-around nanowire junctionless transistor,
TCAD. The nonlocal BTBT model is used to reflect the
auxiliary gate, band-to-band tunneling, energy band
tunneling current in the off state. The doping dependent
mobility degradation model, electric field dependent mobility
I. INTRODUCTION model and Lombardi model are used to describe the carrier
With the development of Moore’s Law, the impact of mobility. The Shockley–Read–Hall (SRH) and Auger
short channel effects (SCEs) and the complicated fabrication recombination are involved. In view of the high doping
of step source/drain junctions are considered more and more concentration, the band-gap narrowing model is also used.
serious in the nanoscale devices. Gate-all-around nanowire
junctionless transistor (GAAJLT) is regarded as one of the III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
most promising candidate structures due to its SCEs
immunity, reduced fabrication complexity and lower thermal The transfer characteristics of our proposed AG-
budget [1-3]. It has n+n+n+ or p+p+p+ structure with highly GAAJLT and the C-GAAJLT are shown in Fig. 2(a). The
doped channel. The channel is volume depleted in the off auxiliary gate length (LAG) and dG-AG are both 10nm. An
state, which results in a significant overlap of the conduction
band of drain region and the valence band of channel region
[4-6]. Furthermore, the electrons from the valence band of
channel can tunnel to the conduction band of drain easily,
and leaving behind holes in the channel region (for n-channel
JLT). The created holes accumulate in the channel region,
which leads to the formation of a parasitic bipolar junction
transistor (BJT) in the lateral direction (n-p-n BJT for n-
channel JLT). The channel region converted into p-type in
the off state acts as the base. The n+ source and the n+ drain
act as the emitter and the collector, respectively. The turn-on
parasitic BJT will result in a significant increase of the off-
state current [7][8], which degrades the on/off current ratio
(ION/IOFF) and the static performance of JLTs.
In this work, a GAAJLT with an auxiliary gate (AG-
GAAJLT) is proposed and investigated through three-
dimensional (3D) numerical simulations. We demonstrate
that the off-state leakage current induced by band-to-band-
tunneling (BTBT) could be effectively suppressed by using
an auxiliary gate. Key design parameters such as the
auxiliary gate voltage (VAG) and the distance between control
gate and auxiliary gate (dG-AG) are analyzed. The results Fig. 1. (a) Schematic structures of our proposed AG-GAAJLT. (b) Cross
show that the AG-GAAJLT has about seven orders of sections of AG-GAAJLT (up) and C-GAAJLT (down).
magnitude lower off-state current compared with the
conventional GAAJLT (C-GAAJLT).

978-1-7281-0286-3/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE

 TABLE I. PARAMETERS USED IN THE DEVICE SIMULATION
Parameter AG-GAAJLT C-GAAJLT
19 -3 19 -3
Silicon channel doping (Nd) 1×10 cm 1×10 cm
Silicon nanowire diameter (d) 10 nm 10 nm
Gate oxide (SiO2) thickness (tox) 1 nm 1 nm
Gate work function 5.0 eV 5.0 eV
Drain voltage (Vds) 1V 1V
Gate length (Lg) 20 nm 20 nm
Auxiliary gate length (LAG) 10 nm
Auxiliary gate voltage (VAG) 0.2-1.2 V
Distance between gate and 6-15 nm
auxiliary gate (dG-AG)

appropriate voltage of 0.8 V is applied to the auxiliary gate.

The off-state current (IOFF) of the AG-GAAJLT is 1.16×10-19
A when gate voltage (Vgs) is -0.3 V, which is decreased by
more than seven orders of magnitude compared with the C-
GAAJLT. A slight degradation in the on-state current (ION)
can also be observed, because the low auxiliary gate voltage
of 0.8 V affects the accumulation of electrons in the on state.
However, the ION/IOFF is significantly improved so that the
slight decrease in ION can be neglected.
The electric fields along the channel of both our proposed
AG-GAAJLT and the C-GAAJLT in off state are shown in
Fig. 2(b), the electric field at the drain side is much higher
than that at the source side in the C-GAAJLT, which triggers
the tunneling of electrons more easily and results in very
high BTBT leakage current. However, the high electric field
at drain side is reduced by 32% in the AG-GAAJLT, which
suppresses the BTBT tunneling effectively. The energy band
diagrams of the AG-GAAJLT and the C-GAAJLT are
illustrated in Fig. 2(c). It is obvious that the auxiliary gate
could modulate the energy band of channel and increase the
length of the potential tunneling path at the drain side
compared with that in the C-GAAJLT. According to [9], the
BTBT current density (JB2B) can be evaluated as
(1) VAG will introduce new BTBT against the reduction of the
*
where m DOS is the density of state (DOS) effective mass, D
is determined by the electron and hole concentrations, W is
the effective width, and Tpro is the tunneling probability
which can be reduced considerably by extending the length
of the potential tunneling path. Tunneling is more likely to
occur in the potential tunneling path with the shortest length
[9], and the BTBT generation rate is positively correlated
with the tunneling probability. Therefore, the prominent
increase in the length of the potential tunneling path leads to
a significantly reduced BTBT generation rate in the AG-
GAAJLT as shown in Fig. 2(d). The lower BTBT generation
rate effectively suppresses the BTBT-induced parasitic BJT
action, leading to a significantly reduction in IOFF in our
proposed AG-GAAJLT.
The effects of VAG and dG-AG are investigated in the AG-
GAAJLT with the fixed gate length of 20 nm. The IOFF and
ION/IOFF as functions of VAG (from 0.2 V to 1.2 V) of the AG-
Fig. 2. (a) Transfer characteristics of the C-GAAJLT and the AG-
GAAJLT at VAG = 0.8 V. (b) Electric fields along the channel at 1nm away
from the channel surface of the AG-GAAJLT and the C-GAAJLT at Vgs = -
0.3 V. (c) Energy band diagrams along the channel at 1nm away from the
channel surface of the AG-GAAJLT and the C-GAAJLT at Vgs = -0.3 V.
(d) BTBT generation rate contour plot of the AG-GAAJLT (down) and the
C-GAAJLT (up) at Vgs = -0.3 V.
GAAJLT at Vgs = -0.3 V and Vds = 1 V are shown in Fig.
3(a). LAG and dG-AG are fixed at 10 nm. It can be seen that the
smallest IOFF can be achieved at VAG = 0.8 V, and the ION/IOFF
is up to 1.378 ×1014 at the point due to the reduced IOFF. Fig.
3(b) shows the minimum tunneling distance and the
maximum BTBT generation rate of the AG-GAAJLT
changing with the VAG. The minimum tunneling distance is
defined as the shortest length of tunneling paths between the
valence band of the channel and the conduction band of the
drain. It can be seen that the minimum tunneling distance
reaches the maximum and the maximum BTBT generation
rate reaches the minimum at VAG = 0.8 V. It implies that IOFF
at different VAG in the AG-GAAJLT are mainly affected by
the BTBT, which is consistent with the theoretical analysis
above. The BTBT generation rate in the whole channel at
VAG = 0.4 V, 0.8 V and 1.2 V are plotted in Fig. 3(c),
respectively. It is obvious that new BTBT region presents at
the margin of the auxiliary gate near the drain at VAG = 1.2
V, which results in the increase of IOFF. It indicates that high
IOFF.
Fig. 3. (a) The plots of IOFF and ION/IOFF versus VAG at Vgs = -0.3 V. (b)
The minimum tunneling distance and maximum BTBT generation rate as
functions of VAG at Vgs = -0.3 V. (c) The BTBT generation rates in the
whole channel at VAG = 0.4 V, 0.8 V and 1.2 V.

Fig. 4. (a) The plots of IOFF and ION/IOFF versus dG-AG at Vgs = -0.3 V. (b)
The minimum tunneling distance and maximum BTBT generation rate as
functions of dG-AG at Vgs = -0.3 V. (c) Energy band diagrams along the
channel at 1nm away from the channel surface of the AG-GAAJLT at dG-AG
= 7 nm, 9 nm, 11 nm, 13 nm and 15 nm.
The IOFF and ION/IOFF as functions of dG-AG (from 6 nm to
15 nm) of the AG-GAAJLT at Vgs = -0.3 V and Vds = 1 V are
shown in Fig. 4(a). LAG and VAG are fixed at 10 nm and 0.8
V respectively. It can be seen that IOFF decreases with dG-AG
changing from 6 nm to 9 nm and then increases as the dG-AG
increasing. The ION/IOFF primarily controlled by IOFF has the
contrary trend with the increasing dG-AG. The optimal ION/IOFF
is around dG-AG = 9 nm. Fig. 4(b) shows the minimum
tunneling distance and the maximum BTBT generation rate
of the AG-GAAJLT changing with the dG-AG. The similar
trend of maximum BTBT generation rate and IOFF further
indicates that the BTBT is restrained effectively at dG-AG = 9
nm. The minimum tunneling distance reaches the maximum
at dG-AG = 8 nm which is a little smaller than 9 nm. The
energy band diagrams at different dG-AG is demonstrated in
Fig. 4(c), which gives an explanation to the changing BTBT.
Another peak in the energy band is created with the
increasing dG-AG, which results in the declining of the
minimum tunneling distance.
IV. CONCLUSION
We propose a GAAJLT with an auxiliary gate to
suppress the leakage current induced by BTBT in the off
state. It shows that the IOFF is decreased by more than seven
orders of magnitude compared to the conventional GAAJLT
due to the restraint of BTBT. The optimizations of the key
parameters VAG and dG-AG are also discussed in detail.
Results show that the ION/IOFF reaches the maximum at VAG =
0.8 V and dG-AG = 9 nm. The AG-GAAJLT with extremely
low leakage current and high ION/IOFF ratio has potential
benefits in future applications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the National Key Research
and Development Program of China under Grant
2016YFA0200400 and Grant 2016YFA0302300, the
National Science and Technology Major Project of China
under Grant 2016ZX02301001, the National Natural Science
Foundation of China under Grant 61306105.
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