//OT Shane, you can't be too rusty on your physics, you did pretty well. You are right on how to calculate the wavelength. I also was not sure what value to choose for the energy, but here is my rationale. The electrons we are interested in are those which are carrying the current between source and drain, which means they are basically free electrons in the conduction band. That means they are not bound to any atoms. I assumed that the main contribution to their energy would be the electric field between source and drain. A voltage of 3V is common for 0.35u processes, so that would give us an electron energy of 3eV, which results in a wavelength of about 7 angstroms. There may be some effects from the silicon crystal or transistor structure that would give us a higher energy, which would lower the wavelength. I know one concern with smaller transistors is "hot" electrons, which have higher energies. There are probably a myriad of other things I am ignoring, too, so to be safe, I rounded off to 10 angstroms, which should be a good ballpark figure.
G.P. |
