Atomistic tight-binding calculations for the investigation of transport in extremely scaled SOI transistors

This paper reviews the basic methodology and highlights advantages and recent applications of atomistic tight-binding calculations for the investigation of carrier transport in extremely scaled SOI transistors. The calculations yield numerous insights into direct and defect-assisted gate oxide tunneling, source-drain transport and tunneling, subband coupling, and carrier quantization in ultrathin-body devices with (possibly strained) Si and SiGe channels. The present results are in very good agreement with the available experimental data and document limitations of the standard effective-mass-based schemes.