Deep Gate Field Penetration Au:ZrO2 Metal–Insulator Tunneling Transistor

A new class of metal-insulator tunneling transistor (MITT) devices is proposed and investigated. The planar dual-gate structure allows for complete gate field penetration of the transistor channel to modulate tunneling current across the channel. For a 5-nm channel length, with contact geometries that reflect the reality of fabricating at such a scale, we show that a 10% decrease in the effective electron tunneling length results in a 5.5× increase in current up to 4.4×10
^-6
mA/μm. The device demonstrates an ON-/OFF-current ratio that is 2.5× greater than that of a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-style MITT with a 5-nm channel length. Without the use of a second gate insulator, the source-to-drain current density is more than 10
⁴
times greater than the source-to-gate leakage current density, indicating the efficacy of the presented realistic MITT implementation.