Performance Considerations of Thin Ferroelectrics (~10 nm HfO2, ~20 nm PZT) FDSOI NCFETs for Digital Circuits at Reduced Power Consumption

Abstract

The paper presents simulation study of thin ferroelectrics (Si doped HfO2, PZT) PGP FDSOI NCFETs at circuit level for high performance, low VDD low-power digital circuits. The baseline PGP FDSOI MOSFET has 20 nm metal gate length with supply voltage varying from 0.5 V to 0.9 V. The circuits studied were 3-stage CMOS ring oscillator, NAND-2 and NOR-2 gates at a frequency of 20 GHz. The paper shows that HfO2 FDSOI NCFET based NAND-2 gates can provide significant reduction in average power consumption, which was ~66% that of baseline FDSOI MOSFET based NAND-2 gates for comparable performance. For the same performance, the average power consumption for PZT FDSOI NCFET based NAND-2 gate was ~86% that of baseline FDSOI MOSFET based NAND-2 gate. The power-delay product of HfO2 FDSOI NCFET based gates was found to be ~24% lower than baseline FDSOI MOSFET based gates and that of PZT FDSOI NCFET based gates was found to be ~21% less than that of baseline FDSOI MOSFET based gates. The performance of HfO2 FDSOI NCFET based gates with increased fan-in and fan-out was also found to be superior to PZT FDSOI NCFET based gates and baseline FDSOI MOSFET based gates.