Current Status and Future Perspectives of Tunnel Field Effect Transistors for Low Power Switching Applications

Power consumption is a critical challenge for scaling driven performance improvement of modern energy efficient integrated circuits (IC) technology. The power dissipation in conventional field effect transistors is constrained by the Boltzmann’s Tyranny, i.e., at least 60 mV gate voltage is required to switch the transistor by one decade of drain current at 300 K. Tunnel field-effect transistors (TFET) is an exceptional candidate as energy efficient switch in comparison to traditional field-effect transistors due to quantum tunneling principle that can enable the further scaling of IC technology and achieve sub-threshold swing ( \(S\) ) < 60 mV/dec and supply voltage < 0.6 V. Additionally, TFET devices illustrate greater invulnerability toward the short channel effects and low power dissipation. This article provides a detailed insight on the recent progress, challenges, and future perspectives of TFET technology based on various theoretically and experimentally demonstrated devices.