SPICE-Compatible Modeling of Silicene Field Effect Transistor and Analog Circuit Design

We present review of the current transport behavior of silicene field effect transistor (FET) in which a monolayer of honeycomb lattice made of silicon is used as a transport channel. Based on this study, we introduce a SPICE-compatible model of the silicene FET. The proposed model is characterized by the channel dimension, temperature and externally applied voltage. In addition, vacancy defects in silicene material are also considered for current transport analysis. We have demonstrated application of our developed model for the design of an amplifier circuit. It is observed that silicene FET based amplifier can be powered by 0.4V with nearly 25dB gain and 200MHz unit gain bandwidth. We also designed an active integrator and frequency doubler using the silicene FFT-based amplifier and simulated. Our results demonstrate that the proposed SPICE-compatible silicene FET model can be used for very low-power and medium-to-low frequency analog circuit designs.

I. Introduction

Recently several practical and theoretical work have been reported to illustrate the electrical properties of silicene, nanoribbon and FET [1]–[3]. Silicene is a graphene-like structure. The difference between silicene and graphene is as follows: unlike graphene in which the atoms locate in a flat layer with a hexagonal structure, the layout of silicon atoms in silicene is a buckled hexagonal shape. This difference provides the bandgap of silicene the tunability, which is useful to the application of silicene in FET implementation. Besides, the hybridization in silicene leads to the electrical property which can be changed by the chemical activity compared to graphene with [4]. Experiments [5], [6] have shown that when the silicene sheet is sliced to nanoribbons, it can perform a hybridization to reduce chemical sensitivity so that the edge of silicene does not react under oxidation.