Nanoscale high-κ/metal-gate CMOS and FinFET based logic libraries

Abstract

During the last four decades, VLSI technology growth has been driven by miniaturization that reduces cost per transistor, power consumption per transistor, with higher packing density and reduced cost of operation. However, the small transistor size leads to very high electric fields across the gate oxide which causes the difficult problem of gate oxide leakage. This problem is mitigated by high-κ/metal-gate technology, in which the gate material is copper (going back to metal from polysilicon) and the gate oxide material is a not silicon dioxide. At the same time, explosive growth of mobile portable electronics has been the driver for many scientific, engineering, and technological breakthroughs in the last few decades. Mobile electronics in particular, such as smart mobile phones, spend most of their operational time in waiting for a call or similar event. However, during these wait states leakage power dissipation has been a major issue since it drains the battery continuously. The industry has explored various solutions to reduce the OFF state leakage and multiple gate devices emerged as a solution to this problem. Double gate FinFET technology is considered as a solution to reduce OFF state leakage while having faster ON and OFF transitions and low-power dissipation. This chapter discusses these devices and presents logic libraries which can be used in the digital synthesis of large integrated circuits using such devices through electronic design automation (EDA) tools.