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.