Investigation of the transport properties of silicon nanowires using deterministic and Monte Carlo approaches to the solution of the Boltzmann Transport Equation

In this paper we investigate the transport properties of silicon nanowire FETs by using two different simulation approaches: the Monte Carlo method and a deterministic, numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation for the quasi-1D electron gas. In both cases we solve the coupled Schroedinger-Poisson equations to extract the profiles of the 1D subbands along the channel; next, the multi-subband Boltzmann equations are tackled with the two different procedures. A very good agreement is achieved between the two approaches to the transport problem in terms of mobility, drain current and internal physical quantities, such as carrier distribution functions and average velocities. Some peculiar features of the low-field mobility as a function of the wire diameter and gate bias are discussed and justified based on the subband energy and wave-function behavior within the cylindrical geometry of the nanowire, as well%