Out-of-Plane Strain Effects on Physically Flexible FinFET CMOS

Mohamed T. Ghoneim, Nasir Alfaraj, Galo T. Sevilla, Hossain M. Fahad, Muhammad Mustafa Hussain

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present a comprehensive electrical performance assessment of hafnium silicate (HfSiOₓ) high-κ dielectric and titanium-nitride (TiN) metal-gate-integrated FinFET-based complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) on flexible silicon on insulator. The devices were fabricated using the state-of-the-art CMOS technology and then transformed into flexible form by using a CMOS-compatible maskless deep reactive-ion etching technique. Mechanical out-of-plane stresses (compressive and tensile) were applied along and across the transistor channel lengths through a bending range of 0.5-5 cm radii for n-type and p-type FinFETs. Electrical measurements were carried out before and after bending, and all the bending measurements were taken in the actual flexed (bent) state to avoid relaxation and stress recovery. Global stress from substrate bending affects the devices in different ways compared with the well-studied uniaxial/biaxial localized strain. The global stress is dependent on the type of channel charge carriers, the orientation of the bending axis, and the physical gate length of the device. We, therefore, outline useful insights on the design strategies of flexible FinFETs in future free-form electronic applications.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2657-2664
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Transactions on Electron Devices
Volume63
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - May 18 2016

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01
Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology within the Office of Sponsored Research under Award CRG-1-2012-HUS-008. The review of this paper was arranged by Editor R. Huang.

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