Nonlinear Contact Effects in Staggered Thin-Film Transistors

The authors introduce a model for field-effect-transistors (FETs) that closes the gap between detailed charge-transport simulations and highly simplified equivalent-circuit models. It is flexible, fast, and easy to use, yielding physically meaningful parameters and allowing the complex scaling behavior of nanoscale transistors to be more easily incorporated into circuit simulations. Its application reveals, importantly, that the static and dynamic characteristics of a FET at very small device dimensions are strongly affected by nonlinear contact resistance.