Hot Electrons in SiO2: Ballistic and Steady-State Transport

One of the strongest impacts of the Very-Large-Scale-Integration (VLSI) on fundamental physics we have been witnessing in recent years is the revival of activities aimed to better understand the properties of electron transport in crystals. For many years the basic “semiconductor equations” (that is: the standard “Drift-Diffusion” coupled to the Poisson equation) have helped engineers to design semiconductor devices which have changed our lives in quite a remarkable way. Only in the past decade or so, with the shrinkage of the device dimensions towards a scale approaching the mean-free-path (or even De Broglie wavelength) of electrons in semiconductors, have we begun feeling the need for more realistic solutions of the Boltzmann-transport-equation (BTE). Hence, the present “golden age” of Monte Carlo simulations, of the “hot-electron”, “high-field” problem, of the efforts to reach fully coupled an self-consistent Poisson-Schrödinger-Monte Carlo description of small devices which we see flooding the scientific literature today.