Nanoelectric Engineering Modeling on Desktop PCs: NEMO-PC

This proposal describes a program to enhance the development of new nanoscale semiconductor devices. The Phase I program centers around porting the Nanoelectronic Engineering Modeling (NEMO) program undertaken at Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) to desktop PCs, with the Microsoft Windows NT operating system and a graphical user interface (GUI). NEMO incorporates nonequilibrium Green's function procedures to provide: (1) band energy, (2) energy resonances, (3) resonant wavefunctions, (4) transmission coefficients as a function of energy and momentum, and (5) current density. NEMO, which has been applied to resonant and interband tunneling problems and lateral transistors, is UNIX-based, with a highly interactive X-Windows GUI. Phase I will demonstrate NEMO operation on desktop PCs and develop a GUI for input/output to/from NEMO. The key advantage of NEMO on a PC is accessibility. Such a tool would vastly simplify the device conceptualization process at a negligible cost, since the software would operate on pentium desktops. Phase II will expand the software to two dimensions and perform a range of fundamental device studies. The program will be undertaken at Scientific Research Associates, Inc. (SRA) with workers at TI as consultants. At the end of Phase I SRA will deliver software for beta testing.