The impact of surface-roughness scattering on the low-field electron mobility in nano-scale Si MOSFETs

A state-of-the-art simulator for the calculation of low-field mobility in inversion layers is presented in this work that accounts for the collisional broadening of the electronic states via the solution of the Dyson equation for the retarded Green's function. The self-consistent Born approximation is used for the calculation of the self-energy contributions due to Coulomb, surface-roughness, acoustic, and non-polar optical phonon scattering. The simulated mobility results for three generations of MOSFET devices are in agreement with the experimental data. At nanoscale dimensions, surface-roughness scattering dominates the collisional broadening of the states and the renormalization of the spectrum. Published by AIP Publishing.