Atomistic Simulation of Band-to-Band Tunneling in III-V Nanowire Field-Effect Transistors

Efficient atomistic simulators are required for full band treatments in strongly quantum confined systems, and for simulation of transport in emerging materials and devices such as graphene. Here we present an efficient transmission matrix based approach to ballistic quantum transport calculation for full three-dimensional, nearest-neighbor tight-binding based atomistic simulations. The method is then used to demonstrate how band-to-band tunneling increases the leakage current in OFF state in field-effect transistors with low band gap semiconductors such as InSb as channel material.