Investigation of Interconnect and Device Designs for Emerging Post-MOSFET and Beyond Silicon Technologies

Abstract

The integrated circuit industry has been pursuing Moore’s curve down to deep nanoscale dimensions that would lead to the anticipated delivery of 100 billion transistors on a 300 mm² die operating below 1V supply in the next 5-10 years. However, the grand challenge is to reliably and efficiently take the full advantage of the unprecedented computing power offered by the billions of nanoscale transistors on a single chip. To mitigate this challenge, the limitations of both the interconnecting wires and semiconductor devices in integrated circuits have to be addressed. At the interconnect level, the major challenge in current high density integrated circuit is the electromagnetic and electrostatic impacts in the signal carrying lines. Addressing these problems require better analysis of interconnect resistance, inductance, and capacitance. Therefore, this dissertation has proposed a new delay model and analyzed the time-domain output response of complex poles, real poles, and double poles for resistance-inductance capacitance interconnect network based on a second order approximate transfer function. Both analytical models and simulation results show that the real poles model is much faster than the complex poles model, and achieves significantly higher accuracy in order to characterize the overshoot and undershoot of the output responses. On the other hand, the semiconductor industry is anticipating that within a decade silicon devices will be unable to meet the demands at nanoscale due to dimension and material scaling. Recently, molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) has emerged as a new super material to replace silicon in future semiconductor devices. Besides, conventional field effect transistor technology is also reaching its thermodynamic limit. Breaking this thermal and physical limit requires adoption of new devices based on tunneling mechanism. Keeping the above mentioned trends, this dissertation also proposed a multilayer MoS₂ channel-based tunneling transistor and identifies the fundamental parameters and design specifications that need to be optimized in order to achieve higher ON-currents. A simple analytical model of the proposed device is derived by solving the time-independent Schrodinger equation. It is analytically proven that the proposed device can offer an ON-current of 80 𝜇A/𝜇m, a subthreshold swing (S) of 9.12 mV/decade, and a 𝐼𝑂𝑁/𝐼𝑂𝐹𝐹 ratio of 10¹².