2.3.1 Semiconductor Materials in MINIMOS-NT

One of the strong features of MINIMOS-NT as a generic device simulator is its capability to consider various semiconductor materials, such as III-V binary and ternary compounds, and SiGe. The past modeling experience from Si MOS structures [72] and Al$_{0.2}$Ga$_{0.8}$As/ In$_{0.2}$Ga$_{0.8}$As/GaAs HEMTs is inherited and preserved.

A large number of published theoretical and experimental reports have been reviewed to include the physical parameters for the $\mathrm{Si}$, $\mathrm{Ge}$ from chemical group IV, and $\mathrm{GaAs}$, $\mathrm{AlAs}$, $\mathrm{InAs}$, $\mathrm{InP}$, or $\mathrm{GaP}$, which are III-V chemical group binary compounds. All these materials are named basic materials later in this work. The combination between two III-V binary materials results in a ternary or a quaternary material. SiGe as a combination of Si and Ge, together with the ternary III-V materials as a combination of the respective binary materials are named alloy materials later in this work. An attempt has been made to allow the user choose arbitrary mole fractions for the alloy materials, although the majority of the simulations performed in this work include III-V compounds lattice-matched to GaAs substrate. This not only gives the designer a good degree of freedom as to the choice of material, but also allows a direct comparison between various devices such as AlGaAs/GaAs, InGaP/GaAs, InP/InGaAs, InAlAs/InGaAs, and SiGe/Si HBTs, AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs and InAlAs/InGaAs HEMTs, or SiGe/Si MOSFETs. However, due to the very limited experimental data on some compound materials such as InGaP, InAlAs, InAsP, and GaAsP, one has to consider interpolation schemes as the only available option to model the variation of some parameters in a continuous range of mole fraction. In these cases, variations of interpolation schemes are studied to find the best fit to the sometimes limited reported data in the literature.