Influence of Elastic and Inelastic Phonon Scattering on the Drive Current of Quasi-Ballistic MOSFETs

In this paper, we study the influence of elastic and inelastic phonon scattering on the drive current of Si MOSFETs under quasi-ballistic transport. Inelastic phonon emission involving energy relaxation helps achieve ballistic current, even in the presence of scattering, if the channel length is scaled down to the 10-nm scale. This result agrees with Natori's previous predictions. However, for longer channel devices, inelastic phonon emission degrades the drain current due to space charge effects caused by charge accumulation. We also demonstrate that source-end potential engineering to electrically reduce the bottleneck barrier length can result in a ballistic current even in longer channel devices.