A new formulation for surface roughness limited mobility in bulk and ultra-thin-body metal–oxide–semiconductor transistors

This paper presents a new model for the surface roughness (SR) limited mobility in MOS transistors. The model is suitable for bulk and thin body devices and explicitly takes into account the non linear relation between the displacement Δ of the interface position and the SR scattering matrix elements, which is found to significantly influence the r.m.s value (Δrms) of the interface roughness that is necessary to reproduce SR-limited mobility measurements. In particular, comparison with experimental mobility for bulk Si MOSFETs shows that with the new SR scattering model a good agreement with measured mobility can be obtained with Δrms values of about 0.2 nm, which is in good agreement with several AFM and TEM measurements. For thin body III–V MOSFETs, the proposed model predicts a weaker mobility degradation at small well thicknesses (Tw), compared to the Tw6 behavior observed in Si extremely thin body devices.