Simplified Inelastic Acoustic—Phonon Hole Scattering Model for Silicon

Abstract

A simplified model for inelastic acoustic phonon scattering of holes in silicon is developed. It consists in approximating both the acoustic phonon energy and the square of the phonon wave vector by lattice-temperature dependent constants. The resulting scattering rate depends only on energy and thus facilitates the search of after-scattering-states during full-band Monte Carlo simulation. The simulation results for the velocity-field characteristics accurately agree with the experimental data at different lattice temperatures, while the population of hot-hole states is significantly enhanced compared to the elastic equipartition approximation. The value of the energy relaxation time to be used in hydrodynamic device simulations is roughly 0.1 ps.