Towards atomistic simulations of the electro-thermal properties of nanowire transistors

In this paper, the electronic and thermal properties of ultra-scaled nanowire transistors are investigated using a single, atomistic, quantum transport simulator based on the Non-equilibrium Green's Function (NEGF) formalism as well as the tight-binding and valence-force-field methods to accurately describe the electron and phonon population, respectively. Although the length of the considered device structures does not exceed a few nanometers, dissipative scattering mechanisms such as electron-phonon and anharmonic phonon-phonon scattering still play an important role and should therefore be fully taken into account by the modeling approach. It will be shown here that these two effects strongly affect the performance of nanowire transistors, either by decreasing (backscattering) or increasing (opening of additional propagation channels) the electrical and thermal currents flowing through them.