Optimization and analysis of Si/SiGe strained vertically stacked heterostructure on insulator FeFinFET for high performance analog and RF applications

Abstract

As semiconductor technology advances, the exploration of novel materials and device architectures becomes imperative to meet the growing demands of integrated circuits for analog and radio-frequency (RF) applications. In this paper, various advanced technologies have been amalgamated such as integration of ferroelectric layer in multigate FinFET along with the adaptation of SOI technology. Further strain technology is also used which employs a tri-layered strained-silicon channel system with the help of SiGe to form Vertically Stacked Heterostructure on Insulator Ferroelectric based FinFET (VS-HOI-FeFinFET) and on comparison with baseline FeFinFET, it is found to show remarkable improvements in terms of various measured parameters such as drain current, switching ratio, threshold voltage and subthreshold swing. Subsequently, gate stacking architecture is incorporated in VS-HOI-FeFinFET
to further optimize the device performance. The four different configurations C1 to C4 are taken in terms of four different combinations of gate stack materials considered for gate oxide such as C1(SiO2+Al2O3), C2(SiO2+HfO2), C3(Al2O3), and C4(Al2O3+HfO2). It is found that the static and analog performance of VS-HOI-GS-FeFinFET enhance sequentially from configuration C1 to C4 such as switching ratio is enhanced upto around 5 times, DIBL and quality factor are improved by around 41% and 58% respectively along with significant improvement in device efficiency, early voltage, intrinsic gain, output conductance and output resistance. Subsequently performance optimization of VS-HOI-GS-FeFinFET with variation in mole fraction of germanium is also explored for various analog metrics. Further, several RF parameters are also explored and it is observed that the gain frequency product (GFP) and gain transconductance frequency product (GTFP) are augmented by around three times in magnitude along with 16% reduction in the unity
gain cut off frequency in C4 configuration, exhibiting its ability of high frequency amplification with minimized noise distortion thus makes the device suitable for various high performance Analog and RF applications.