Monte Carlo study of electron transport in strained silicon inversion layers

The effect of degeneracy both on the phonon-limited mobility and the effective mobility including surface-roughness scattering in unstrained and biaxially tensile strained Si inversion layers is analyzed. We introduce a new method for the inclusion of the Pauli principle in a Monte Carlo algorithm. We show that incidentally degeneracy has a minor effect on the bulk effective mobility, despite non-degenerate statistics yields unphysical subband populations and an underestimation of the mean electron energy. The effective mobility of strained inversion layers slightly increases at high inversion layer concentrations when taking into account degenerate statistics.