Impacts of Trapezoidal Fin of 20-nm Double-Gate FinFET on the Electrical Characteristics of Circuits

Abstract

In this study, we analyze the impacts of the trapezoidal fin shape of a double-gate FinFET on the electrical characteristics of circuits. The trapezoidal nature of a fin body is generated by varying the angle of the sidewall of the FinFET. A technology computer-aided-design (TCAD) simulation shows that the on-state current increases, and the capacitance becomes larger, as the bottom fin width increases. Several circuit performance metrics for both digital and analog circuits, such as the fan-out 4 (FO4) delay, ring oscillator (RO) frequency, and cut-off frequency, are evaluated with mixed-mode simulations using the 3D TCAD tool. The trapezoidal nature of the FinFET results in different effects on the driving current and gate capacitance. As a result, the propagation delay of an inverter decreases as the angle increases because of the higher on-current, and the FO4 speed and RO frequency increase as the angle increases but decrease for wider angles because of the higher impact on the capacitance rather than the driving strength. Finally, the simulation reveals that the trapezoidal angle range from 10 degrees to 20 degrees is a good tradeoff between larger on-current and higher capacitance for an optimum trapezoidal FinFET shape