Modeling self-heating effects in 10nm channel length nanowire transistors

In this work we focus on investigation of self-heating effect in 10 nm wide, 7 nm thick and 10 nm long channel of a silicon nanowire transistor, shown in Fig. 1. The difference between this structure and the previously investigated 2D fully depleted SOI transistors is that the SiO₂ is now all around the structure, not just at the top and the bottom. Because SiO₂ has very low thermal conductivity, and the nanowire itself has low thermal conductivity (because of phonon boundary scattering in the rectangular cross section), it was expected that self heating effects are more pronounced in the nanowire transistor when compared to the same channel length fully-depleted SOI device. Indeed, our extrapolation of the results at hand for fully depleted SOI devices with 10 nm channel length were expected to be on the order of 4.4%.