Posted by Adele HARS on August 31, 2012, at Advanced Substrate News

Power & Performance: GSS Sees SOI Advantages for FinFETS

Are FinFETs better on SOI? In a series of papers, high-profile blogs and subsequent media coverage, Gold Standard Simulations (aka GSS) has indicated that, yes, FinFETs should indeed be better on SOI.
To those of us not deeply involved in the research world, much of this may seem to come out of nowhere.  But there’s a lot of history here, and in this blog we’ll take a look at what it’s all about, and connect a few dots.

The GSS IEDM ’11 Paper

GSS is a recent spin-off of Scotland’s University of Glasgow – but there’s nothing new to the research community about these folks.  The core GSS-U.Glasgow team has been presenting important papers on device modeling at IEDM (which is one of the most prestigious of our industry’s conferences) and elsewhere for many years.
At the risk of stating the obvious, accurate simulations are incredibly important. Technologists need to be able to predict what results they can expect from different possible transistor design options before selecting the most promising ones.  Then they also need to provide reliable models to designers who will use them before committing chips to silicon.  One of the biggest challenges is predicting variability, which as we all know is getting worse as transistors scale to ever-smaller dimensions.
At IEDM ’11 last December, GSS-U.Glasgow presented Statistical variability and reliability in nanoscale FinFETs.  This covered  “A comprehensive full-scale 3D simulation study of statistical variability and reliability in emerging, scaled FinFETs on SOI substrate with gate-lengths of 20nm, 14nm and 10nm and low channel doping…”.  Essentially they concluded that scaling FinFETs on SOI should be no problem – and in fact the statistical variability of a 10nm FinFET on SOI would be about the same as the industry’s currently seeing in 45nm bulk CMOS.
That paper was based on work that the GSS-U.Glasgow team had done on two major European projects: the EU ENIAC MODERN project, and the EU FP7 TRAMS project.  It’s perhaps worth looking a little more closely at what those projects are about – and who’s involved:

• A key objective of the MODERN (for Modeling and Design of Reliable, process variation-aware Nanoelectronic devices, circuits and systems) is to develop “effective methods for evaluating the impact of process variations on manufacturability, design reliability and circuit performance”.  Other partners in the project include ST, Leti, NXP, Infineon, Numonyx (now Micron) and Synopsys.
• The objective of the TRAMS (for ‘Tera-scale Reliable Adaptive Memory Systems’) project is “to investigate in depth potential new design alternatives and paradigms, which will be able to provide reliable memory systems out of highly unreliable nanodevices at a reasonable cost and design effort”. Other partners in the project include Intel, imec, and UPC/BarcelonaTech.

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