Eur. Phys. J. B (2012) 85: 274
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2012-30220-2

Regular Article

High performance silicene nanoribbon field effect transistors with current saturation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Mesoscopic Physics and Department of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China
² Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China
³ Department of Physics, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, 68182-0266 Nebraska, USA

^a e-mail: jinglu@pku.edu.cn

Received: 13 March 2012
Received in final form: 23 May 2012
Published online: 6 August 2012

Abstract

We investigate field effect transistors (FETs) based on semiconducting armchair-edged silicene nanoribbons (ASiNRs) by using ab initio quantum transport calculations. These FETs have high performance with an I_on/I_off ratio of over 10⁶ and a subthreshold swing as small as 90 mV/decade. Impressively, the output characteristic shows a saturation behavior. The drain-current saturation is an advantage with respect to device speed, but it’s usually absent in carbon-based (e.g., graphene, graphene nanoribbons, carbon nanotubes, and organic single-molecule) FETs.