Simulation Comparison of Hot-Carrier Degradation in Nanowire, Nanosheet and Forksheet FETs

Forksheet (FS) FETs are a novel transistor architecture consisting of vertically stacked nFET and pFET sheets at opposite sides of a dielectric wall. The wall allows reducing the p- to nFET separation (p-to-n separation), thus enabling further logic cell area scaling without requiring gate length scaling. We report hot-carrier degradation (HCD) simulations of FS FETs and compare this architecture to nanowire (NW) and nanosheet (NS) FETs. HCD is shown to decrease with increasing sheet width in both NS and FS FETs when taking interface state generation into account. Considering that a FS FET can be made wider than an NS FET because of the reduced p-to-n separation, lower HCD for the FS FET is observed. Finally, we make an initial assessment of the impact of oxide defect charging in the FS wall. We confirm decreasing influence of fixed wall charge for increasing sheet widths and estimate that the overall impact of wall charging will stay under control at operating conditions.

Automated summary

Forksheet (FS) FETs are a new transistor architecture that utilizes vertically stacked nFET and pFET sheets with a dielectric wall, reducing p-to-n separation. Hot-carrier degradation (HCD) simulations show that both FS FETs and NS FETs can reduce HCD with increasing sheet width when considering interface state generation. Furthermore, an initial assessment suggests that the impact of oxide defect charging in the FS wall can be controlled under operating conditions.