Frontiers in the atomistic simulation of nanoscale electron devices
Abstract: Addressing accurate simulations of electronic and transport properties of nanoscale devices requires to consider physical models including quantum mechanical effects as well as phonon scattering and spatial fluctuations due to non-ideal surfaces and defects. Self-consistent quantum simulations based on the non-equilibrium Green’s function formalism have been extensively used for this purpose during the last years. This talk will briefly discuss this methodology and show advantages and drawbacks of different Hamiltonian models used to describe the energy dispersion of the channel material, going from the effective mass approximation to the empirical tight-binding model. Illustrative results on FDSOI and nanowire FETs will be presented. Finally, the theory and application of a first-principles transport methodology employing a basis set composed of the Bloch functions will be introduced. Such an approach enables full ab-initio quantum transport calculations with a reasonable computational cost and permits to address self-consistent simulations of electron devices based on novel 2D materials.
Marco Pala received the physics degree and the PhD in electronical engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy in 2000 and 2004, respectively. From 2004 to 2005 he was post-doc at CEA-LETI, Grenoble, France. He joined the CNRS as research scientist in 11/2005 at IMEP-LAHC, Grenoble. From 2016 he is with the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (C2N), Palaiseau, France, where is the leader of the computational electronics group. His main research interests concern the electronic and transport properties of nanoscale devices. Recently, he worked on quantum transport calculations based on ab-initio methods to assess the use of new materials in nanoelectronics. He is co-author of 73 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 48 proceedings in international conferences.
