Convective scheme solution of the Boltzmann transport equation for nanoscale semiconductor devices (Q2464997)

In a short-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) a high electric field can occur at the drain end of the device which can lead to device degradation. Thus there is a need to determine the energy distribution of carriers in the device and model hot carrier effects. The problem is that the devices like MOSFET are scaled to nanometer regime in which the electron mean free path becomes comparable to the device dimensions and the continuous models based on the drift-diffusion equation are no longer adequate. Hence kinetic models based on the nonlinear Boltzmann equation are needed. The convective scheme (CS) proposed by the authors roughly speaking consists in dividing the phase space into cells. Convective scheme tracks a group of particles which have just undergone collision in a given initial cell to determine where they have the next collision. Between collisions particles move `ballistically' following the Vlasov equation and, at the end of each `ballistic' step, the probabilities needed to find the scattering operator, are evaluated. The whole scheme is implemented iteratively. The authors note that CS is similar to calculations by cellular automata method. The paper presents a novel application of the CS method to two-dimensional semiconductor devices with boundary conditions.