Self-heating on bulk FinFET from 14nm down to 7nm node

Abstract

Self-heating effects in scaled bulk FinFETs from 14nm to 7nm node are discussed based on 3D FEM simulations and experimental measurements. Following a typical 0.7x scaling, heat confinement is expected to increase by 20% in Si-channel FinFETs and by another 57% for strained Ge-channel. Reducing the drive current needed to reach target performance by reducing capacitances, and fin depopulation help mitigate self-heating effects. These thermal behaviors propagates to AC circuit benchmark, resulting in ∼5% performance variation for high performance devices due to device scaling and increased number of fins.