III-V compound semiconductors offer a path to continue Moore's law due to their excellent electron transport properties. One major challenge, integrating III-V's on Si, can be addressed by using vapor-liquid-solid grown vertical nanowires. InAs is an attractive material due to its superior mobility, although InAs metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) typically suffer from band-to-band tunneling caused by its narrow band gap, which increases the off-current and therefore the power consumption. In this work, we present vertical heterostructure InAs/InGaAs nanowire MOSFETs with low off-currents provided by the wider band gap material on the drain side suppressing band-to-band tunneling. We demonstrate vertical III-V MOSFETs achieving off-current below 1 nA/μm while still maintaining on-performance comparable to InAs MOSFETs; therefore, this approach opens a path to address not only high-performance applications but also Internet-of-Things applications that require low off-state current levels.
Keywords: InAs; InGaAs; MOSFETs; heterostructure; nanowire; vapor−liquid−solid.