Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide a new three dimension physically based model to calculate the initial stress in silicon germanium (SiGe) film due to thermal mismatch after deposition. We should note that there are many other sources of initial stress in SiGe films or in the substrate. Here, the author is focussing only on how to model the initial stress arising from thermal mismatch in SiGe film. The author uses this initial stress to calculate numerically the resulting extrinsic stress distribution in a nanoscale PMOS transistor. This extrinsic stress is used by industrials and manufacturers as Intel or IBM to boost the performances of the nanoscale PMOS and NMOS transistors. It is now admitted that compressive stress enhances the mobility of holes and tensile stress enhances the mobility of electrons in the channel.

During thermal processing, thin film materials like polysilicon, silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, or SiGe expand or contract at different rates compared to the silicon substrate according to their thermal expansion coefficients. The author defines the thermal expansion coefficient as the rate of change of strain with respect to temperature.

Several numerical experiments have been used for different temperatures ranging from 30 to 1,000°C. These experiments did show that the temperature affects strongly the extrinsic stress in the channel of a 45 nm PMOS transistor. On the other hand, the author has compared the extrinsic stress due to lattice mismatch with the extrinsic stress due to thermal mismatch. The author found that these two types of stress have the same order (see the numerical results on Figures 4 and 12). And, these are great findings for semiconductor industry.

Front-end process induced extrinsic stress is used by manufacturers of nanoscale transistors as the new scaling vector for the 90 nm node technology and below. The extrinsic stress has the advantage of improving the performances of PMOSFETs and NMOSFETs transistors by enhancing mobility. This mobility enhancement fundamentally results from alteration of electronic band structure of silicon due to extrinsic stress. Then, the results are of great importance to manufacturers and industrials. The evidence is that these results show that the extrinsic stress in the channel depends also on the thermal mismatch between materials and not only on the material mismatch.

The model the author is proposing to calculate the initial stress due to thermal mismatch is novel and original. The author validated the values of the initial stress with those obtained by experiments in Al-Bayati et al. (2005). Using the uniaxial stress generation technique of Intel (see Figure 2). Al-Bayati et al. (2005) found experimentally that for 17 percent germanium concentration, a compressive initial stress of 1.4 GPa is generated inside the SiGe layer.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and apply accurate and original models to understand and analyze the effects of the fabrication temperatures on thermal-induced stress and speed performance of nano positively doped metal oxide semiconductor (pMOS) transistors.

The speed performances of nano pMOS transistors depend strongly on the mobility of holes, which itself depends on the thermal-induced extrinsic stress σ. The author uses a finite volume method to solve the proposed system of partial differential equations needed to calculate the thermal-induced stress σ accurately.

The thermal extrinsic stress σ depends strongly on the thermal intrinsic stress σ₀, thermal intrinsic strain ε₀, elastic constants C11 and C12 and the fabrication temperatures. In literature, the effects of fabrication temperatures on C11 and C12 needed to calculate thermal-induced stress σ₀ have been ignored. The new finding is that if the effects of fabrication temperatures on C11 and C12 are ignored, then, the values of stress σ₀ and σ will be overestimated and, then, not accurate. Another important finding is that the speed performance of nano pMOS transistors will increase if the fabrication temperature of silicon-germanium films used as stressors is increased.

To predict correctly the thermal-induced stress and speed performance of nano pMOS transistors, the effects of fabrication temperatures on the elastic constants required to calculate the thermal-induced intrinsic stress σ₀ should be taken into account.

There are three levels of originalities. The author considers the effects of the fabrication temperatures on extrinsic stress σ, intrinsic stress σ₀ and elastic constants C11 and C12.

Pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are widely used in electronic circuits. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new digital background calibration method to correct the capacitor mismatch, finite direct current (DC) gain and nonlinearity of residue amplifiers in pipelined ADCs.

The errors are corrected by defining new functions based on generalized Newton–Raphson algorithm. Although the functions have analytical solutions, an iterative procedure is used for calibration. To accelerate the calibration process, proper initialization for the errors is identified by using evaluation estimation block and solving inverse matrix.

Several behavioral simulations of a 12-bit 100MS/s pipelined ADC in MATLAB indicate that signal-to-(noise + distortion) ratio (SNDR) and spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) are improved from 30dB/33dB to 70dB/79dB after calibration. Calibration is achieved in approximately 2,000 clock cycles.

The digital part of the proposed method is implemented on field-programmable gate array to validate the performance of the pipelined ADC. The experimental result shows that the degradation of SNDR, SFDR, integral nonlinearity, differential nonlinearity and effective number of bits is negligible according to fixed-point operation vs floating-point in simulation results.

The novelty of this study is to use Newton–Raphson algorithm combined with appropriate initialization to reduce the number of divisions as well as calibration time, which is suitable in the recent nano-meter complementary metal oxide semiconductor technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the operation of p-type side gate junctionless silicon transistor (SGJLT) in accumulation region through experimental measurements and 3-D TCAD simulation results. The variation of electric field components, carrier’s concentration and valence band edge energy towards the accumulation region is explored with the aim of finding the origin of SGJLT performance in the accumulation operational condition.

The device is fabricated by atomic force microscopy nanolithography on silicon-on-insulator wafer. The output and transfer characteristics of the device are obtained using 3-D Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) Sentaurus software and compared with experimental measurement results. The advantages of AFM nanolithography in contact mode and Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology were implemented to fabricate a simple structure which exhibits the behaviour of field effect transistors. The device has 200-nm channel length, 100-nm gate gap and 4 μm for the distance between the source and drain contacts. The characteristics of the fabricated device were measured using an Agilent HP4156C semiconductor parameter analyzer (SPA). A 3-D TCAD Sentaurus tool is used as the simulation platform. The Boltzmann statistics is adopted because of the low doping concentration of the channel. Hydrodynamic model is taken to be as the main transport model for all simulations, and the quantum mechanical effects are ignored. A doping dependent Masetti mobility model was also included as well as an electric field dependent model with Shockley–Read–Hall (SRH) carrier recombination/generation.

We have obtained that the device is a normally on state device mainly because of the lack of work functional difference between the gate and the channel. Analysis of electric field components’ variation, carrier’s concentration and valence band edge energy reveals that increasing the negative gate voltage drives the device into accumulation region; however, it is unable to increase the drain current significantly. The positive slope of the hole quasi-Fermi level in the accumulation region presents mechanism of carriers’ movement from source to drain. The influence of electric field because of drain and gate voltage on charge distribution explains a low increasing of the drain current when the device operates in accumulation regime.

The proposed side gate junctionless transistors simplify the fabrication process, because of the lack of gate oxide and physical junctions, and implement the atomic force microscopy nanolithography for fabrication process. The optimized structure with lower gap between gate and channel and narrower channel would present the output characteristics near the ideal transistors for next generation of scaled-down devices in both accumulation and depletion region. The presented findings are verified through experimental measurements and simulation results.