On the electron mobility enhancement in biaxially strained Si MOSFETs

This paper reports a detailed experimental and simulation study of the electron mobility enhancement induced by the biaxial strain in (001) silicon MOSFETs. To this purpose, ad hoc test structures have been fabricated on strained Si films grown on different SiGe virtual substrates and the effective mobility of the electrons has been extracted. To interpret the experimental results, we performed simulations using numerical solutions of Schroedinger-Poisson equations to calculate the charge and the momentum relaxation time approximation to calculate the mobility. The mobility enhancement with respect to the unstrained Si device has been analyzed as a function of the Ge content of SiGe substrates and of the operation temperature. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.