The impact of silicon nano-wire technology on the design of single-work-function CMOS transistors and circuits

This three-dimensional exploratory study on vertical silicon wire MOS transistors with metal gates and undoped bodies demonstrates that these transistors dissipate less power and occupy less layout area while producing comparable transient response with respect to the state-of-the-art bulk and SOI technologies. The study selects a single metal gate work function for both NMOS and PMOS transistors to alleviate fabrication difficulties and then determines a common device geometry to produce an OFF current smaller than 1 pA for each transistor. Once an optimum wire radius and effective channel length is determined, DC characteristics including threshold voltage roll-off, drain-induced barrier lowering and sub-threshold slope of each transistor are measured. Simple CMOS gates such as an inverter, two- and three-input NAND, NOR and XOR gates and a full adder, composed of the optimum NMOS and PMOS transistors, are built to measure transient performance, power dissipation and layout area. Simulation results indicate that worst-case transient time and worst-case delay are 1.63 and 1.46 ps, respectively, for a two-input NAND gate and 7.51 and 7.43 ps, respectively, for a full adder for a fan-out of six transistor gates (24 aF). Worst-case power dissipation is 62.1 nW for a two-input NAND gate and 118.1 nW for a full adder at 1 GHz for the same output capacitance. The layout areas are 0.0066 µm2 for the two-input NAND gate and 0.049 µm2 for the full adder circuits.