Introduction<\/p>\n
Advanced silicon technology tends towards ever thinner and shorter gate oxide resulting in significant quantum effects. The most relevant effect is the confinement of the carriers. For instance, in a Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor capacitor C-V characteristic, the threshold voltage is shifted and the apparent oxide thickness is increased compared to the C-V characteristic expected with a semi-classical approach. To model this confinement accurately in a device simulator based on a drift-diffusion approach, two methods are treated in this paper. The first one, and the most accurate, is to include the Schr\u00f6dinger equation into a self-consistent computation with the Poisson equation. Unfortunately this solution, due to its non-locality, has a significant numerical cost and cannot be efficiently coupled with the continuity equations giving the current flow in practical applications. All the same this method is used in 1D as a reference: the C-V characteristic and the carrier density profiles are useful to validate simpler methods. Different simpler methods compatible with the drift-diffusion approach have been developed [1, 2]. In this paper we describe a density gradient model which introduces a quantum potential correction in the continuity equations. In the following, we present first the Schr\u00f6dinger-Poisson model, then the density gradient model and the comparison to each other.<\/p>\n
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