A theoretical interpretation of magnetoresistance mobility in silicon inversion layers

The magnetoresistance technique has been introduced recently as a means of determining experimentally the mobility in bulk metal-oxide-semiconductor transistor and silicon-on-insulator devices. This technique does not require a precise determination of the channel length, and it also has the advantage of allowing mobility extraction when the application of other methods is problematic, notably with weak inversion and short device length. The magnetoresistance mobility extracted in this way is related but not identical to the normal effective drift mobility. In this work we simulate electron transport in the presence of a magnetic field for different device structures. The simulations allow us to study the conditions under which magnetoresistance mobility and effective mobility coincide, and to measure the difference, where it exists. We find that at low temperatures the two quantities coincide, while at room temperature a difference of more than 20% may appear. We take this to be a consequence of the energy difference between subbands and the resulting distribution of electrons among them. We then explain the fact that the two mobility measures coincide at low temperatures when only the ground subband is occupied by analyzing the energy dependence of the momentum relaxation time.