Re: vth vs Length
Eq (1) states that the threshold voltage is only a function of the manufacturing technology and the applied body bias VSB. The threshold can therefore be considered as a constant over all NMOS (PMOS) transistors in a design. As the device dimensions are reduced, this model becomes inaccurate, and the threshold potential becomes a function of L, W, and VDS. Two-dimensional second-order effects that were ignorable for long-channel devices suddenly become significant.
In the traditional derivation of the VTO, for instance, it is assumed that the channel depletion region is solely due to the applied gate voltage and that all depletion charge beneath the gate originates from the MOS field effects. This ignores the depletion regions of the source and reverse-biased drain junction, which become relatively more important with shrinking channel lengths. Since a part of the region below the gate is already depleted (by the source and drain fields), a smaller threshold voltage suffices to cause strong inversion. In other words, VT0 decreases with L for short-channel devices.