Trigonal-Tellurium (t-Te) has recently garnered interest in the nanoelectronics community because of its measured high hole mobility and low-temperature growth. However, a drawback of tellurium is its small bulk bandgap (0.33 eV), giving rise to large leakage currents in transistor prototypes. We analyze the increase of the electronic bandgap due to quantum confinement and compare the relative stability of various t-Te nanostructures (t-Te nanowires and layers of t-Te) using first-principles simulations. We found that small t-Te nanowires (≤4 nm²) and few-layer t-Te (≤3 layers) have bandgaps exceeding 1 eV, making Tellurium a very suitable channel material for extremely scaled transistors, a regime where comparably sized silicon has a bandgap that exceeds 4 eV. Through investigations of structural stability, we found that t-Te nanowires preferentially form instead of layers of t-Te since nanowires have a greater number of van der Waals (vdW) interactions between the t-Te-helices. We develop a simplified picture of structural stability relying only on the number of vdW interactions, enabling the prediction of the formation energy of any t-Te nanostructure. Our analysis shows that t-Te has distinct advantages over silicon in extremely scaled nanowire transistors in terms of bandgap and the t-Te vdW bonds form a natural nanowire termination, avoiding issues with passivation.

三角碲（t-Te）最近因其高空穴迁移率和低温生长而引起了纳米电子界的关注。但是，碲的一个缺点是其小的带隙（0.33 eV），从而在晶体管原型中引起大的泄漏电流。我们使用第一原理模拟分析了由于量子限制而引起的电子带隙的增加，并比较了各种t-Te纳米结构（t-Te纳米线和t-Te层）的相对稳定性。我们发现小的t-Te纳米线（≤4nm ²）和几层t-Te（≤3层）的带隙超过1 eV，这使得碲成为非常适合规模非常大的晶体管的沟道材料，在这种情况下，尺寸相当的硅具有超过4 eV的带隙。通过对结构稳定性的研究，我们发现t-Te纳米线优先形成而不是t-Te层，因为纳米线在t-Te螺旋之间具有更大量的范德华（vdW）相互作用。我们仅依靠vdW相互作用的数量得出结构稳定性的简化图，从而可以预测任何t-Te纳米结构的形成能。我们的分析表明，在带隙方面，t-Te在超大规模纳米线晶体管中具有比硅明显的优势，并且t-Te vdW键形成自然的纳米线终端，避免了钝化问题。