The complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) scaling process of the recent decades, coupled with new device structures and materials, has aggravated thermal problems and turned them into major reliability issues for deeply-scaled devices. As a consequence, the thermal transport dynamic and its impact on the device performance at submicron dimensions is established as a contemporary theme. In this context, a new selfconsistent electro-thermal particle-based device simulator for the study of self-heating effects in p-type metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) based in silicon is developed and presented. The electrical module of the tool utilizes the Ensemble Monte Carlo method to perform the charge transport, whereas the thermal module evaluates the non-isothermal temperature profiles by solving the phonon energy balance equations for both acoustic and optical phonon baths. These temperature profiles are fed back into the electrical module, which adjusts the carriers’ scattering rate accordingly, thus, properly accounting for the device current capability degradation. The developed tool proved to be suitable for sub-100 nm device simulations, and it was used to perform relevant case study simulations of 24-nm channel length bulk and fully-depleted siliconon- insulator (FD-SOI) MOSFETs. General device parameters extracted from the simulations are qualitatively in agreement with the expected behavior, as well as data from the literature, ensuring the proper operation of the tool. Electro-thermal simulations of bulk and FD-SOI devices provided both acoustic and optical phonon temperature profiles across the transistor structure, as well as the heat generation map and the device power dissipation. Some results were also extracted via Joule heating thermal model, and they are presented for comparison. The current degradation due to self-heating was found to be significant for FD-SOI devices, but very modest for bulk ones. At a fixed bias point of VD =VG = 1:5 V, for instance, bulk devices presented a current variation of as much as 0:75%, whereas for FD-SOI devices it reached up to 8:82% for Tgate = 400 K. Hot spot acoustic (lattice) and optical phonon temperatures were extracted as a function of the applied bias for both topologies. The lattice temperature rise, for instance, exceeded 10 K and 150 K over the heat sink temperature for bulk and FD-SOI transistors, respectively, observing the same bias point and gate temperature presented earlier. The particle-based nature of the tool is also suitable for the study of the impact of trap activity in MOSFETs and its interplay with self-heating effects. Simulations of charge traps were used to analyze the statistical distribution of the current deviations in 25-nm bulk MOSFETs due to traps. The simulations showed that these deviations are exponentially-distributed, as experimentally observed and reported in the literature. Electro-thermal simulations of charge traps in bulk and FD-SOI transistors revealed that the largest degradation on the device current occurs when the effects of self-heating and trap activity take place simultaneously. At lower biases, the impact of charge traps dominates the current degradation, whereas the self-heating component prevails for larger biases.

Organic electronics has evolved into a well-established research field thanks to major progresses in material sciences during recent decades. More attention was paid to this research field when “the discovery and development of conductive polymers” was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. Electronic devices that rely on tailor-made material functionalities, the ability of solution processing and low-cost manufacturing on flexible substrates by traditional printing techniques are among the key features in organic electronics. The common theme while exploring organic electronics, and the focus of this thesis, is that (semi-)conducting polymers serve as active materials to define the principle of operation in devices. This thesis reviews two kinds of organic electronic devices. The first part describes electrochemical devices based on conducting polymers. Active matrix addressed displays that are printed on flexible substrates have been obtained by arranging electrochemical smart pixels, based on the combination of electrochemical transistors and electrochromic display cells, into cross-point matrices. The resulting polymer-based active-matrix displays are operated at low voltages and the same active material is used in the electrochemical transistors as well as in the electrochromic display cells, simply by employing the opto-electronic properties of the material. In addition to this first part, a switchable optical polarizer based on electrochromism in a stretch-aligned conducting polymer is described. The second part reports switchable charge traps in polymer diodes. Here, a device based on a solid-state blend of a conjugated polymer and a photochromic molecule has been demonstrated. The solid state blend, sandwiched between two electrodes, provide a polymer diode that allows reversible current modulation between two different charge transport mechanisms via externally triggered switching of the charge trap density.

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