EFFECTS OF EVANESCENT MODES AND SUBBAND MIXING IN RESONANT-TUNNELING TRANSISTORS

We theoretically investigate a gated resonant tunneling diode as a pot ential new quantum resonant tunneling transistor. The resonant tunneli ng transistor is dimensionally controllable in the active channel usin g a lateral depletion region. Under bias conditions in which the reson ant tunneling transistor reaches zero dimensionality in the well regio n, we consider the attractive and repulsive perturbation potentials (V -pe) of impurity or defect scattering in source and well regions. A tr ansfer matrix formalism is employed to calculate the transmission prob abilities and current densities through the double barrier, and we des cribe the scattering matrices using the presence of evanescent modes i n various lateral confinement configurations. We discuss the effect of scattering and subband mixing on the current-voltage characteristics of resonant tunneling transistors. (C) 1997 American Institute of Phys ics.