Monte Carlo simulations of nanometric devices beyond the “mean-field” approximation

For nanoscale electron devices, the role of a single-electron (or a single-impurity) can have a large impact on their electrical characteristics. A new method for introducing the long-range and short-range Coulomb interaction in semiconductor semi-classical Monte Carlo simulations is presented. The method is based on directly dealing with a many-particle system by solving a different Poisson equation for each electron. The present work shows the numerical viability of this alternative approach for nanoscale devices with few (<100) electrons. The method is compared with the traditional “mean-field” Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown, numerically, that the “mean-field” approximation produces important errors for aggressively-scaled devices.