Atomistic Simulation of Quantum Transport in Nanoelectronic Devices

In the past five decades, the transistor size had shrunk continuously from micrometers to nanometers, to today's atomic scale. The continuous change in the transistor size may result in a discontinuous change in the underlying physics. Quantum effects and atomic details are no longer negligible in a nanotransistor having only a few tens of atoms in the transport dimension.

This lecture is to shed some light on the atomistic simulation of quantum transport in nanoelectronic devices. The main idea is to build up nanoelectronic devices atom by atom on a computer and predict the transport behavior by using the very basic physics laws. To have an insight into the approach, a device simulation tool called NanoDsim is thoroughly analyzed as a paradigm.