Steady-State and Transient Electron Transport within Bulk InAs, InP and GaAs: An Updated Semiclassical Three-Valley Monte Carlo Simulation Analysis

A. Guen-Bouazza, C. Sayah, B. Bouazza, N. E. Chabane-Sari

Research Unit of Materials and Renewable Energies, Faculty of Technology, University of Tlemcen, Tlemcen, Algeria.

DOI: 10.4236/jmp.2013.45089                

Abstract

An ensemble Monte Carlosimulation is used to compare high field electron transport in bulk InAs, InP and GaAs. In particular, velocity overshoot and electron transit times are examined. For all materials, we find that electron velocity overshoot only occurs when the electric field is increased to a value above a certain critical field, unique to each material. This critical field is strongly dependent on the material, about 3 kV/cm for InAs, 10 kV/cm for InP and 5 kV/cm for the case of GaAs, We find that InAs exhibits the highest peak overshoot velocity and that this velocity overshoot lasts over the longest distances when compared with GaAs and InP. Finally, we estimate the minimum transit time across a 1 μm InAs sample to be about 2 ps. Similar calculations for InP and GaAs yield 6.6 and 5.4 ps, respectively. We find that the optimal cutoff frequency for an ideal InAs based device ranges from around 79 GHz when the device thickness is set to 1 μm. We thus suggest that indium arsenide offers great promise for future high-speed device applications. The steady-state and transient velocity overshoot characteristics are in fair agreement with other recent calculations.

Keywords

Electron Transport; Simulation; Monte Carlo Simulation; Velocity Overshoot; Materials

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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