Contact block reduction method and its application to a 10 nm MOSFET device

With the scaling of semiconductor devices to nano-size dimensions, gate lengths reach their physical limits of 8-15 nm. In such devices, a variety of undesirable effects begin to be prominent, including gate leakage, discrete impurity effects and source-to-drain tunnelling. To address the issue of source-to-drain tunnelling we apply to a prototypical 10 nm MOSFET device a novel highly efficient method, termed contact block reduction (CBR) method. It has been reported recently that the CBR method allows us to calculate the ballistic current (transmission function) through an arbitrarily shaped, multi-terminal two- or three-dimensional device. Here we show that in the ballistic case the density matrix of the open device can be computed using the same method. This opens a possibility for an efficient fully quantum-mechanical self-consistent calculation within the ballistic limit.