Interaction of Negative Bias Instability and Self-Heating Effect on Threshold Voltage and SRAM (Static Random-Access Memory) Stability of Nanosheet Field-Effect Transistors

Micromachines (Basel). 2024 Mar 21;15(3):420. doi: 10.3390/mi15030420.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effects of negative bias instability (NBTI) and self-heating effect (SHE) on threshold voltage in NSFETs. To explore accurately the interaction between SHE and NBTI, we established an NBTI simulation framework based on trap microdynamics and considered the influence of the self-heating effect. The results show that NBTI weakens the SHE effect, while SHE exacerbates the NBTI effect. Since the width of the nanosheet in NSFET has a significant control effect on the electric field distribution, we also studied the effect of the width of the nanosheet on the NBTI and self-heating effect. The results show that increasing the width of the nanosheet will reduce the NBTI effect but will enhance the SHE effect. In addition, we extended our research to the SRAM cell circuit, and the results show that the NBTI effect will reduce the static noise margin (SNM) of the SRAM cell, and the NBTI effect affected by self-heating will make the SNM decrease more significantly. In addition, our research results also indicate that increasing the nanosheet width can help slow down the NBTI effect and the negative impact of NBTI on SRAM performance affected by the self-heating effect.

Keywords: NSFET; nanosheet width; negative bias instability (NBTI); reliability; self-heating effect (SHE); technology computer-aided design (TCAD).