Title: Investigation of discrete dopant induced variability in silicon nanowire MOSFETs using 3D simulation

Authors: Chun-Yu Chen; Jyi-Tsong Lin; Meng-Hsueh Chiang

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 804, Taiwan ' Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 804, Taiwan ' Department of Electronic Engineering, National Ilan University, I-Lan 260, Taiwan

Abstract: Impact of discrete doping in n-type gate-all-around silicon nanowire transistors is studied using 3D numerical simulation with quantum mechanical effect accounted for. We investigate the devices in the sub-22 nm technology node based on an assumption of sphere dopants with 1 nm diameter. Comprehensive study of equal random dopant probability in the channel is first reported. Our results show that the silicon nanowire FETs have more severe threshold variation when the random dopant is located in the centre of the channel than is located near source/drain boundary. The predicted threshold voltage variability ranges from 0.19 V to 0.26 V while most cases have threshold voltages below 0.23 V. The leakage current variability is within an order of magnitude and the output current variability is within one hundred micro amperes.

Keywords: discrete doping; random distribution; threshold variation; gate-all-around FETs; silicon nanowire FETs; nanoelectronics; nanotechnology; MOSFETs; 3D simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNT.2014.059808

International Journal of Nanotechnology, 2014 Vol.11 No.1/2/3/4, pp.40 - 50

Published online: 15 Nov 2014 *

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