We investigated the dependence of temperature uniformity dufi ng millisecond annealing (MSA) on the pattern density and its effect on device characteristics and static random access memory (SRAM) yields with 45-nm node technology. By comparing flash lamp annealing (FLA) and laser spike annealing (LSA), we found FLA was diffi cult to use in our multiple MSA scheme without absorbing layers because of its high temperature uniformity sensitivity to pattern density. LSA was found to be more promising due to its lower sensitivity to pattern density and higher potential for enhancing performance. We also found hot spots were generated during LSA; however, these can easily be avoided by introducing LSA-friendly design rules.
Leakage current is an important qualitative metric of LSI (Large Scale Integrated circuit). In this paper, we focus on reduction of leakage current variation under the process variation. Firstly, we derive a set of quadratic equations to evaluate delay and leakage current under the process variation. Using these equations, we discuss the cases of varying leakage current without degrading delay distribution and propose a procedure to reduce the leakage current variations. From the experiments, we show the proposed method effectively reduces the leakage current variation up to 50% at 90 percentile point of the distribution compared with the conventional design approach.
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