Effect of potential disorder on shot noise suppression in nanoscale devices

With the progressive downscaling of device dimensions and the corresponding reduction of the signal-to-noise ratio, the effect of noise on the operation of nanoscale devices increases and thus particular care has to be devoted to its study. Here we numerically analyze the effect of one-dimensional and two-dimensional potential disorder on the shot noise of a device based on a semiconductor heterostructure and we show that only in very particular conditions the diffusive noise regime is reached, while in more general cases only a gradual increase of shot noise toward the full shot noise behavior of strongly localized systems is observed as the disorder increases.