Influence of anharmonic phonon decay on self-heating in Si nanowire transistors

Anharmonic phonon-phonon scattering is incorporated into an electro-thermal quantum transport approach based on the nonequilibrium Green's function formalism. Electron-phonon and phonon-phonon interactions are taken into account through scattering self-energies solved in the self-consistent Born approximation. While studying self-heating effects in ultra-scaled Si nanowire transistors, it is found that the phonon decay process softens the artificial accumulation of high energy phonons caused by electron relaxations close to the drain region. This leads to an increase of the device current in the ON-state and a reduction of the effective lattice temperature.