  After more than 30 years of validation of Moore's law, the CMOS technology
has already entered the nanoscale (sub-100nm) regime and faces strong
limitations. The nanowire transistor is one candidate which has the potential
to overcome the problems caused by short channel effects in SOI MOSFETs and has
gained signifi - cant attention from both device and circuit developers. In
addition to the effective suppression of short channel effects due to the
improved gate strength, the multi-gate NWFETs show excellent current drive and
have the merit that they are compatible with conventional CMOS processes. To
simulate these devices, accurate modeling and calculations based on quantum
mechanics are necessary to assess their performance limits, since
cross-sections of the multigate NWFETs are expected to be a few nanometers wide
in their ultimate scaling. In this paper we have explored the use of ATLAS
including the Bohm Quantum Potential (BQP) for simulating and studying the
shortchannel behaviour of nanowire FETs.
