SHIELD-TFET: A Variability-Tolerant Distributed Emitter Architecture for Contact-Limited Tunnel Transistors

This preprint introduces SHIELD-TFET, a distributed emitter architecture designed to improve current reproducibility in contact-limited tunnel field-effect transistors (TFETs) under stochastic process variation. Rather than attempting to eliminate contact-induced variability at the materials level, the proposed architecture absorbs it through emitter partitioning, statistical averaging, and local ballast-based negative feedback. The manuscript develops a semi-analytical framework for variability scaling, including the role of inter-branch correlation, and identifies practical design regimes for emitter count, ballast strength, and branch spacing. The work is intended as a framework-level and architecture-level contribution for variability-aware low-power device design, with future experimental and TCAD-level validation left as follow-up work.