Macroscopic Transport Models for Microelectronics Devices

With the rapid feature size reduction of modern semiconductor devices accurate description of hot-carrier phenomena is becoming very important. Frequently used carrier transport models are the traditional drift-diffusion model and energy-transport models which also consider the average carrier energy as an independent solution variable. Recent results show, however, that the average energy is in many cases not sufficient for accurate modeling. Both the transport models themselves and the models for the physical parameters seem to be affected. After a review of the conventional models we present highly accurate impact ionization and gate current models based on a six moments transport model.