Intrinsic Performance of Germanane Schottky Barrier Field-Effect Transistors

Germanane (GeH), a hydrogenated germanium monolayer, is a new family of 2-D semiconductors, exhibiting promising potential for electronic device applications. Here, we investigate GeH Schottky barrier (SB) field-effect transistors (FETs) using atomistic quantum transport simulations. Our simulation results reveal that the ohmic-contact device with zero SB height (Φ
_Bn
) exhibits ~20% lower ON-current than the metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) FET counterpart due to the inherent tunnel barrier at the metal-semiconductor junction. We also compare 14-nm-channel GeH and black phosphorus (BP) SBFETs with a finite SB height of Φ
_Bn
= 0.22 eV for both devices. Our results show that GeH outperforms BP in the ON-state, but it can suffer from larger leakage current in the OFF-state. We further investigate the effect of barrier height in GeH SBFET by varying Φ
_Bn
from 0 eV to a half bandgap (0.78 eV). In general, as barrier height increases, both ON-current and the minimum leakage current are reduced. It is also observed that, with increasing SB height, intrinsic delay increases but the required energy per switching decreases, indicating the trade-off between the device speed and the energy dissipation. Our benchmarking of GeH SBFET against GeH and BP MOSFETs demonstrates that GeH generally outperforms BP in terms of energy-delay product (EDP). By performing careful engineering of SB height along with the device threshold voltage, we show that the minimum EDP of GeH SBFET can be as comparable as that of the MOSFET counterpart, suggesting great potential of GeH SBFETs for future switching device applications.