Device-Circuit Co-design Approaches for Multi-gate FET Technologies
Speaker: Ajay Bhoj
Series: Final Public Orals
Location:
Engineering Quadrangle J401
Date/Time: Monday, February 25, 2013, 1:00 p.m.
- 2:30 p.m.
Abstract:
Planar CMOS technology has reached its scaling limits at the 22nm node, where it is increasingly difficult to design high-performance low-power devices with good yield in the presence of global and local process variations. Multi-gate FET technol- ogy is the best alterative that can extend scaling to the sub-10nm technology nodes with minimum additional processing costs. However, owing to the non-planar na- ture of multi-gate devices, several challenges in process technology, CAD/layout design, and testing need to be addressed to enable design portability from planar to multi-gate FET chips.
This thesis strives to bridge the device-circuit co-design gap that has severely limited predictive modeling of circuits using emerging multi-gate/FinFET de- vices during early stages of process technology development.
First, the traditional notion of leveraging independent-gate devices for power reduction is challenged, by contrasting logic gates having symmetric gate-workfunction shorted/independent-gate FinFETs alongside logic gates having asymmetric gate-workfunction shorted-gate FinFETs, in a high-performance process.
The superiority of asymmetric gate-workfunction devices is demonstrated by com- paring leakage-delay trends, and the downsides of logic gates employing a mix of shorted and independent-gate devices is brought out from a testing/fault modeling perspective.
Next, efficient methodologies are developed for unifying the layout and pro- cess simulation worlds, in order to breach the ‘many-device TCAD barrier’ that has limited the applicability of 3D-TCAD modeling for over a decade.
Here, im-
portant bottlenecks for layout to 3D circuit structure generation, such as the time and memory complexity of 3D process simulation, are identified. To bypass the latter, a radically new layout-/process-/device-independent approach based on automated structure synthesis is proposed and evaluated for accuracy and
scala-
bility, using SRAM bitcell structures with 32/22nm process assumptions.
After addressing the 3D-TCAD structure generation issue, several hitherto in- tractable problems, such as true 3D parasitic capacitance extraction for generic multi-gate circuit layouts in sub-32nm technology nodes, entered the realm of pos- sibility. Here, the need for transport analysis based capacitance extraction is ex- plained, by highlighting the difference between field solver based extractions and TCAD based extractions on sub-32nm IBM SOI SRAMs. Thereafter, the combina- tion of structure synthesis and transport analysis based extraction is validated with hardware data from two companion 6T SRAM arrays fabricated in an IBM 32nm SOI HKMG process. Next, a multi-gate version of the structure synthesizer is used to predict and analyze key parasitic capacitance trends in 6T multi-gate SRAMs at the 22/14/10nm technology nodes.
Finally, this thesis delineates a path to enable multi-gate layout/process/circuit co-design, using a unified 3D/mixed-mode 2D-TCAD methodology for systemat- ically designing and evaluating different 6T FinFET SRAM bitcell topologies in a 22nm SOI process. Here, the role of parasitic capacitances, i.e., their dependencies on fin/gate pitch, etc., are examined in detail, and the need to evaluate multi-gate bitcells based on dynamic behavior, rather than DC metric targets, is highlighted.
