In this work, we propose the Bilayer Graphene Tunnel Field Effect Transistor (BG-TFET) as a device suitable for fabrication and circuit integration with present-day technology. It provides high Ion/Ioff ratio at ultra-low supply voltage, without the
limitations in terms of prohibitive lithography and patterning requirements for circuit integration of graphene nanoribbons. Our investigation is based on the solution of the coupled Poisson and Schroedinger equations in three dimensions, within the Non-Equilibrium Green (NEGF) formalism on a Tight Binding Hamiltonian. We show that the small achievable gap of only few hundreds meV is still enough for promising TFET operation, providing a large Ion/Ioff ratio in excess of 10^3 even for a supply voltage of only 0.1 V. Key to this performance is the low quantum capacitance of bilayer graphene, which permits to obtain an extremely small sub-threshold swing S smaller than 20 mV/decade at room temperature.
We explore the device potential of tunable-gap bilayer graphene FET exploiting the possibility of opening a bandgap in bilayer graphene by applying a vertical electric field via independent gate operation. We evaluate device behavior using atomistic
simulations based on the self-consistent solution of the Poisson and Schroedinger equations within the NEGF formalism. We show that the concept works, but bandgap opening is not strong enough to suppress band-to-band tunneling in order to obtain a sufficiently large Ion/Ioff ratio for CMOS device operation.
