Contact-Barrier Free, High Mobility, Dual-Gated Junctionless Transistor Using Tellurium Nanowire

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a dual-gated junctionless tellurium nanowire transistor with high mobility and low contact resistance, promising for next-generation sub-5 nm electronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tellurium nanowire junctionless transistor with high mobility and zero Schottky barrier, advancing scalable, high-performance nanoelectronics.

Findings

Achieved a phonon-limited hole mobility of 570 cm²/V·s at 270 K.

Mobility increases to 1390 cm²/V·s at lower temperatures.

Realized a high drive current of 216 μA/μm with an on-off ratio over 2×10^4.

Abstract

Gate-all-around nanowire transistor, due to its extremely tight electrostatic control and vertical integration capability, is a highly promising candidate for sub-5 nm technology node. In particular, the junctionless nanowire transistors are highly scalable with reduced variability due to avoidance of steep source/drain junction formation by ion implantation. Here we demonstrate a dual-gated junctionless nanowire \emph{p}-type field effect transistor using tellurium nanowire as the channel. The dangling-bond-free surface due to the unique helical crystal structure of the nanowire, coupled with an integration of dangling-bond-free, high quality hBN gate dielectric, allows us to achieve a phonon-limited field effect hole mobility of $570\,\mathrm{cm^{2}/V\cdot s}$ at 270 K, which is well above state-of-the-art strained Si hole mobility. By lowering the temperature, the mobility increases to $1390\,\mathrm{cm^{2}/V\cdot s}$ and becomes primarily limited by Coulomb scattering. \txc{The combination of an electron affinity of $\sim$4 eV and a small bandgap of tellurium provides zero Schottky barrier height for hole injection at the metal-contact interface}, which is remarkable for reduction of contact resistance in a highly scaled transistor. Exploiting these properties, coupled with the dual-gated operation, we achieve a high drive current of $216\,\mathrm{\mu A/\mu m}$ while maintaining an on-off ratio in excess of $2\times10^4$. The findings have intriguing prospects for alternate channel material based next-generation electronics.