Influence of anharmonic phonon decay on self-heating in Si nanowire transistors

Phonon-phonon scattering is included in an atomistic and full-band quantum transport approach where electron and phonon transport are fully coupled based on the Non-equilibrium Green's function formalism. The investigation of self-heating effects in ultra-scaled Si nanowire transistors shows that the artificial accumulation of high energy phonons caused by electron relaxations close to the drain region is softened due to the phonon decay process. As a consequence, the device current is increased in the ON-state and the effective lattice temperature is reduced.