Tremendous improvements in the fabrication technology have allowed to scale the physical dimensions of the transistors and also to develop different promising 3-D architectures that may allow continuing Moore's law. In this paper, we perform a comparative delay analysis of different 3-D device architectures and study the impact of surface roughness and self-heating on the on-current using a comprehensive in-house simulation framework comprising Schrödinger, Poisson, and Boltzmann transport equation solvers and comprising relevant scattering mechanisms and self-heating. Our results highlight that parasitic capacitance can alter the relative ranking of the architectures from delay point of view. We demonstrate that surface roughness can cause architecture and material-dependent current degradation, and hence, it is necessary to account for it in simulation-based benchmarking different architectures. © 1963-2012 IEEE.