QUANTUM TRANSPORT IN SEMICONDUCTOR DEVICES

Abstract

It is clear that continued scaling of semiconductor devices will bring us to a regime in which device gate lengths are less than 50 nm within another decade. Pushing to dimensional sizes such as this will probe the transition from classical to quantum transport, and there is no present approach to the quantum regime that has proved effective. Contrary to the classical case in which electrons are negligibly small, the finite extent of the momentum space available to the electron sets size limitations on the minimum wave packet—this is of the order of a few nanometers. While quantum transport formalism has been applied to a variety of problems, in most cases it has not been overly successful. In this paper, we discuss the problems and some of the approximate approaches which will ease the above-mentioned transition.