Small Slope Switches

Power dissipation in switching devices is considered today as the most important roadblock for future nanoelectronic circuits and systems. The complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) power consumption consists of two contributions: the dynamic and the static leakage components. The tunnel metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) offers an appealing concept for a substantial lowering of the energy dissipated in a switching device by replacing the thermionic emission of charge carriers over a barrier to enter the MOSFET channel with a tunneling process. If the tunneling process is made sufficiently effective, tunnel FETs can ultimately yield an effective cooling of the injecting source contact through a band-pass filter action that enables steep inverse subthreshold slopes over many orders of magnitude, thus providing low values of the average subthreshold swing. This chapter focuses on the characteristics of metal-ferroelectric-MOS structures recently reported by EPFL group based on a complete set of experiments exploiting the internal metal contact.