Lundstrom Tutorial

MOSFET scaling continues to push transistors to smaller and smaller dimensions while advances in nanoscience provide fascinating new opportunities for developing novel electronic device technologies. The central theme of 21st Century electronics will be nanotechnology - nanoscale devices and nanostructured materials that produce gigascale systems. Research today is setting the stage for this revolution in technology by exploring new ways to build devices, to structure matter at the nanoscale, to characterize such structures, to simulate them, and to design systems with nanoscale components. Although the drift-diffusion approach provided a powerful conceptual framework for the past 60 years of semiconductor device development, we believe that this traditional approach must now be complemented by a new conceptual approach to devices and materials. We call this approach "Electronics from the Bottom Up." In this tutorial, I will present an unconventional approach to the nanoscale MOSFET. The tutorial will begin with a treatment of the ballistic MOSFET and then discuss the role of scattering in quasi-ballistic MOSFETs. We will discuss how the velocity saturates in a ballistic MOSFET and how mobility is related to the on-current of a ballistic MOSFET. Finally, the physics and technology concerns that determine the ultimate scaling limits of a MOSFET will be identified. In the process of this tutorial, I hope to show students that small MOSFETs are easily understood, if approached from the right perspective. I hope that the tutorial also encourages students to explore Electronics form the Bottom Up more generally.