Leakage Current and Hot-Carrier Injection in the Junctionless Nanowire FETs Enhanced by Tensile Mechanical Stress

In this brief, the gate-induced drain leakage (GIDL) current and hot-carrier injection (HCI) in the twin junctionless nanowire (JL-NW) gate-all-around (GAA) field-effect transistor (FET) is investigated with induced mechanical stress (MS) from few MPa to GPa level. GIDL is observed to exponentially increase with induced MS, a consequence of the decrease in the bandgap and effective mass, which leads to high band-to-band tunneling (BTBT). However, the induced MS enhances the impact ionization and secondary electron-hole pair generation, and some hot electrons are trapped into the gate oxide, causing the HCI and gate leakage current to increase almost linearly. The study highlights the importance of MS in device reliability.