Investigation of localized versus uniform strain as a performance booster in InAs Tunnel-FETs

• We have investigated the effect of localized compared to uniform strain on the performance of n-type InAs TFETs.
• Localized strain at the drain improves the Ion-Ioff ratio and the switching time.
• Biaxial tensile strain is the optimal configuration for performance improvement in InAs TFETs.

We investigate the effect of spatially localized versus uniform strain on the performance of n-type InAs nanowire Tunnel FETs. To this purpose we make use of a simulator based on the NEGF formalism and employing an eight-band k · p Hamiltonian, describing the strain implicitly as a modification of the band-structure. Our results show that, when the uniform strain degrades the subthreshold slope because of an increased band-to-band-tunneling at the drain, a localized strain at the source side permits to obtain a better tradeoff between on-current and subthreshold slope than a uniform strain configuration.