Nicolas Roisin^1*, Guillaume Brunin^2,3*, Gian-Marco Rignanese^3,4*, Denis Flandre^1*, Jean-Pierre Raskin^1*, Samuel Poncé^3,4*

1 Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics, Université catholique de Louvain, Place du Levant 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

2 Matgenix, A6K Advanced Engineering Center, Square des Martyrs 1, 6000 Charleroi, Belgium

3 European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility, Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanosciences, Université catholique de Louvain, Chemin des Etoiles 8, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

4 WEL Research Institute, Avenue Pasteur 6, 1300 Wavre, Belgium

* Corresponding authors emails: nicolas.roisin@uclouvain.be, guillaume.brunin@matgenix.com, gian-marco.rignanese@uclouvain.be, denis.flandre@uclouvain.be, jean-pierre.raskin@uclouvain.be, samuel.ponce@uclouvain.be

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:sy-4g [version v4]

Publication date: Jul 19, 2024

How to cite this record

Nicolas Roisin, Guillaume Brunin, Gian-Marco Rignanese, Denis Flandre, Jean-Pierre Raskin, Samuel Poncé, Phonon-limited mobility for electrons and holes in highly-strained silicon, Materials Cloud Archive 2024.108 (2024), https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:sy-4g

Description

Strain engineering is a widely used technique for enhancing the mobility of charge carriers in semiconductors, but its effect is not fully understood. In this work, we perform first-principles calculations to explore the variations of the mobility of electrons and holes in silicon upon deformation by uniaxial strain up to 2% in the [100] crystal direction. We compute the π₁₁ and π₁₂ electron piezoresistances based on the low-strain change of resistivity with temperature in the range 200 K to 400 K, in excellent agreement with experiment. We also predict them for holes which were only measured at room temperature. Remarkably, for electrons in the transverse direction, we predict a minimum room-temperature mobility about 1200 cm²/Vs at 0.3% uniaxial tensile strain while we observe a monotonous increase of the longitudinal transport, reaching a value of 2200 cm²/Vs at high strain. We confirm these findings experimentally using four-point bending measurements, establishing the reliability of our first-principles calculations. For holes, we find that the transport is almost unaffected by strain up to 0.3% uniaxial tensile strain and then rises significantly, more than doubling at 2% strain. Our findings open new perspectives to boost the mobility by applying a stress in the [100] direction. This is particularly interesting for holes for which shear strain was thought for a long time to be the only way to enhance the mobility.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
data.zip MD5md5:b58f133955d257cb808036b452a8b30d	161.2 MiB	Output files and results of the first-principles computations
code.zip MD5md5:c289882ea646ea17c6490c8fed8e2128	277.5 KiB	Python and bash scripts used to perform the first-principles computations
README.md MD5md5:f363a7277c51d931387f9189965de0dc	2.6 KiB	Readme file with explanation about the structure of the archive

License

Files and data are licensed under the terms of the following license: Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International.
Metadata, except for email addresses, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.

External references

Keywords

silicon strain mobility piezoresistive first principles