I would like to simulate the electrical response of nanowire field effect transistors that exposed to nano-focused hard X-rays using Sentaurus TCAD tool. How can I model the X-ray source?
In such an electromagnetic radiation nanowire detector device, use Sentaurus ATLAS with a suitable photonic module like Blaze
You can also use the Luminous built-in module, with ATLAS. In all cases, use the beam statement to define the x-ray radiation source.
Best wishes
Amira Nabil
SDevice does have a gamma radiation model (see chapter: radiation models).
You have to have the dose rate of your source and perform a transient by varying the dose time. For example a synchrotron radiation during x-ray lithography.
My experience with it was not great. it required a tedious work to input the timed voltage ramps with the total dose. the transient simulations when using dose rate were hard to converge, and the temporal evolution of the traps are not included (at least to my understanding ).
According to my literature review, when it comes to ionization damage from massless particles, researchers use analytical formulas to calculate how much the total dose generate insulator (often SiO2) and interface (often SiO2/Si) trap surface densities, ie Not and Nit, respectively. Then INJECT those values directly into their respective region or region interface. Clearly, the downside of this method is the lack of the temporal analysis.
I know that in the latest sentaurus installation (R2020.09), there is a model in sentaurus topography that takes into account charge effects during plasma etching (just in case your process use it).
Another way to study this effect is to use Ansys software, particularly, Lumerical which is now integrated with their software packages. according to Lumerical website it can do charge transport. But, in the case of nanowires, you will have to make sure that it can model piezoelectric effects (which are important for those devices), and figure out how to export the stress and strain data from Sprocess to Ansys !. Not to mention that a hydrodynamic transport model is also necessary.
Otherwise, you will have to go with a full multiphysics simulation (which I did not try).
There maybe other ways to do it properly...maybe someone in the comments can enlighten us.
Below are few interesting simulation methods for total ionizing dose (TID) that I adopted.
I hope my answer brought some clarification.