First foundry platform of complementary tunnel-FETs in CMOS baseline technology for ultralow-power IoT applications: Manufacturability, variability and technology roadmap

Abstract

We have first manufactured Complementary Tunnel-FETs (C-TFETs) in standard 12-inch CMOS foundry. With abrupt tunnel junction consideration for improved TFET performance, technology of monolithically integrating C-TFET with CMOS is developed. Planar Si C-TFET inverter is also demonstrated, indicating a new electrical isolation requirement between neighboring devices for practical C-TFET integration on bulk substrate. For high-volume production, the variability of C-TFETs are experimentally investigated, demonstrating an intrinsic trade-off between performance enhancement and variability suppression induced by dominant variation source in traditional TFETs, which is mainly impacted by the band-to-band tunneling generation area. By new TFET device design, improved performance and variability simultaneously are experimentally achieved, and circuit-level implementation shows significant operation speed enhancement (up to 93%) and energy reduction (by 66%) at VDD of 0.4V, as well as remarkably suppressed variation, indicating its great potential for ultralow-power applications.