Full-Band Monte Carlo Analysis of Electron Transport in Arbitrarily Strained Silicon

Full-band Monte Carlo simulations of electron transport in bulk silicon under several strain conditions are performed. The band structures of Si for arbitrary stress and strain conditions are calculated using the empirical non-local pseudopotential method. To restrict the EPM calculation to the smallest possible domain the symmetry properties for a given stress condition are taken into account. Results for biaxially strained Si grown on a [001] oriented Si
_1-x
Ge
_x
substrate and for uniaxial tensile stress in [110] direction exhibit a high mobility enhancement. The effective masses and the energy splitting of the valleys extracted from the band structure explain the mobility gain observed in the simulation results. It is shown that the effective masses can change considerably under certain stress conditions