Ch. 7 MOSFET Technology Scaling, Leakage Current, and Other Topics MOS ICs have met the world’s growing needs for electronic devices for computing, communication, entertainment, automotive, and other applications with steady improvements in cost, speed, and power consumption. Such steady improvements in turn stimulate and enable new applications and fuel the growth of IC sales. There is now an entrenched expectation that this trend of rapid improvements will continue. How the MOSFET might continue to meet this expectation is the subject of this chapter. One overarching topic introduced in this chapter is the off-state current or the leakage current of the MOSFETs. This topic compliments the discourse on the on-state current presented in the previous chapter. 7.1 Technology Scaling—Small is Beautiful Since the 1960’s the price of one bit of semiconductor memory has dropped 100 million times and the trend continues. The cost of a logic gate has undergone a similarly dramatic drop. This rapid price drop has stimulated new applications and semiconductor devices have improved the ways people carry out just about all human activities. The primary engine the powered the ascent of electronics is “miniaturization”. By making the transistors and the interconnects smaller, more circuits can be fabricated on each silicon wafer and therefore each circuit becomes cheaper. Miniaturization has also been instrumental in the improvements in speed and power consumption. Gordon Moore made an empirical observation in the 1960’s that the number of devices on a chip doubles every 18 months or so. The “Moore’s Law” is a succinct description of the persistent periodic increase in the level of miniaturization. Each time the minimum line width is reduced, we say that a new technology generation or technology node is introduced. Examples of technology generations are 0.18µm, 0.13µm, 90nm, 65nm, 45nm…generations. The numbers refer to the minimum metal line width. Poly-Si gate length may be smaller. At each new node, the various feature sizes of circuit layout, such as the size of contact holes, are 70% of the previous node. This practice of periodic size reduction is called scaling. Historically, a new technology node is introduced every three years or so. The main reward for introducing a new technology node is the reduction of circuit size by 2. (70% of previous line width means ~50% reduction in area, i.e. 0.7 x 0.7= 0.49.) Since nearly twice as many circuits can be fabricated on each wafer with each new technology node, the cost per circuit is reduced significantly. That is the engine that drives down the cost of ICs. Besides line width, some other parameters are also reduced with scaling such as the MOSFET gate oxide thickness and the power supply voltage. The reductions are chosen such that the transistor current density (Ion/W) increases with each new node. Also, thesmaller transistors and shorter interconnects lead to smaller capacitances. Together, these changes cause the circuit delays to drop (Eq. 6.7.1). Historically, integrated circuit speed has increased roughly 30% at each new technology node. Scaling does another good thing. Eq. 6.7.6 shows that reducing capacitance and, especially, the power supply voltage is effective for lowering the power consumption. Thanks to the reduction in C and Vdd, power consumption per chip has increased only modestly per node in spite of the rise in switching frequency, f and (gasp) the doubling of transistors per chip at each technology node. If there had been no scaling, doing the job of a single PC microprocessor chip-- running 500M transistors at 2GHz using 1970 technology would require the electrical power output of a medium-size power generation plant. In summary, scaling improves cost, speed, and power per function with every new technology generation. All of these attributes have been improved by 10 to 100 million times in four decades --- an engineering achievement unmatched in human history! When it comes to ICs, small is beautiful. Table 7.1 shows that scaling is expected to continue. But, what are the barriers to further scaling? Can scaling go on forever? Table 7.1: Excerpt of 2003 ITRS technology scaling from 90nm to 22nm. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors presents the industry’s annually updated projection of future technologies and challenges [1]. HP:High Performance technology. LSTP: Low Standby Power technology for portable applications. EOT: Equivalent Oxide Thickness. Year of Production 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 Technology Node (nm) 90 65 45 32 22 HP physical Lg (nm) 37 25 18 13 9 EOT(nm) (HP/LSTP) 1.2/2.1 0.9/1.6 0.7/1.3 0.6/1.1 0.5/1.0 Vdd (HP/LSTP) 1.2/1.2 1.1/1.1 1.1/1.0 1.0/0.9 0.9/0.8 Ion/W,HP (mA/mm) 1100 1510 1900 2050 2400 Ioff/W,HP (mA/mm) 0.05 0.07 0.1 0.3 0.5 Ion/W,LSTP (mA/mm) 440 510 760 880 860 Ioff/W,LSTP (mA/mm) 1e-5 1e-5 6e-5 8e-5 1e-47.2 Subthreshold Current--- “Off” is not totally “Off” Circuit speed improves with increasing Ion, therefore it would be desirable to use a small Vt. Can we set Vt at an arbitrarily small value, say 10mV? The answer is no. At Vgs<Vt, an N-channel MOSFET is in the off-state. However, an undesirable leakage current can flow between the drain and the source. The MOSFET current observed at Vgs<Vt is called the subthreshold current. This is the main contributor to the MOSFET off-state current, Ioff. Ioff is the Id measured at Vgs=0 and Vds=Vdd. It is important to keep Ioff very small in order to minimize the static power that a circuit consumes even when it is in the standby mode. For example, if Ioff is a modest 100nA per transistor, a cell-phone chip containing one hundred million transistors would consume so much standby current (10A) that the battery would be drained in minutes without receiving or transmitting any calls. A desk-top PC chip may be able to tolerate this static power but not much more before facing expensive problems with cooling the chip and the system. Fig. 7-1 shows a typical subthreshold current plot. It is almost always plotted in a semilog Ids versus Vgs graph. When Vgs is below Vt, Ids is an exponential function of Vgs. Fig. 7-2
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