Ballistic modeling of InAs nanowire transistors

•The intrinsic performance of ballistic InAs nanowire transistors is evaluated.•The transport properties within nanowires of different diameters are mapped.•The influence from non-parabolic bands and self-consistency is quantified.•Scaling of the transistor structure is investigated.

In this work, the intrinsic performance of InAs nanowire transistors is evaluated in the ballistic limit. A self-consistent Schrödinger–Poisson solver is utilized in the cylindrical geometry, while accounting for conduction band non-parabolicity. The transistor characteristics are derived from simulations of ballistic transport within the nanowire. Using this approach, the performance is calculated for a continuous range of nanowire diameters and the transport properties are mapped. A transconductance exceeding 4S/mm is predicted at a gate overdrive of 0.5V and it is shown that the performance is improved with scaling.Furthermore, the influence from including self-consistency and non-parabolicity in the band structure simulations is quantified. It is demonstrated that the effective mass approximation underestimates the transistor performance due to the highly non-parabolic conduction band in InAs. Neglecting self-consistency severely overestimates the device performance, especially for thick nanowires. The error introduced by both of these approximations gets increasingly worse under high bias conditions.