A comprehensive description of band gap and
effective masses of III-V semiconductor bulk and ultra-thin body
(UTB) structures under realistic biaxial and uniaxial strain is
given using numerical simulations from four different electronic
structure codes. The consistency between the different tools is
discussed in depth. The nearest neighbor sp3d5s* empirical tightbinding
model is found to reproduce most trends obtained by ab
initio Density Functional Theory calculations at much lower
computational cost. This model is then used to investigate the
impact of strain on the ON-state performance of realistic
In0.53Ga0.47As UTB MOSFETs coupled with an efficient method
based on the well-known top-of-the-barrier model. While the
relative variation of effective masses between unstrained and
strained cases seems promising at first, the calculations predict
no more than 2% performance improvement on drive currents
from any of the studied strain configurations.
