Physical Origin of the Excess Thermal Noise in Short Channel MOSFETs


IEEE Electron Device Letters, Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 101-103, Feb. 2001.

While the drain thermal noise of long channel MOSFETs agrees with the van der Ziel model, considerably larger noise has been observed in MOSFETs with channel lengths below 1.7um. Recent compact modeling approaches have explained this phenomenon using local voltage noise sources. However, the use of local voltage noise sources in device modeling suffers from the spatial correlation of the noise sources. This results in a dominant noise contribution near the drain junction, which is more significant when the hot carrier effects are included. By contrast, quasi-2D numerical simulation results for HEMT devices have suggested that the drain noise of the FET is not in fact dominated by the drain-side but rather by the source-side contributions. Recent numerical noise simulation results have qualitatively demonstrated the observed excess thermal noise in 0.25um MOSFETs based on the Hydrodynamic (HD) formulation. However, the physical mechanism responsible for such excess noise has not been identified. This paper investigates the physical origin of the excess noise by comparing the differences between local and non-local carrier transport models in noise simulation.

Download the paper (PDF)