Quantum transport in a nanosize silicon-on-insulator metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor

An approach is developed for the determination of the current flowing through a nanosize silicon-on-insulator metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors. The quantum-mechanical features of the electron transport are extracted from the numerical solution of the quantum Liouville equation in the Wigner function representation. Accounting for electron scattering due to ionized impurities, acoustic phonons, and surface roughness at the Si/SiO2 interface, device characteristics are obtained as a function of a channel length. From the Wigner function distributions, the coexistence of the diffusive and the ballistic transport naturally emerges. It is shown that the scattering mechanisms tend to reduce the ballistic component of the transport. The ballistic component increases with decreasing the channel length.