Impact of Scaling on Nanosheet FET and CMOS Circuit Applications

In this paper, the impact of scaling on the gate all around the nanosheet field effect transistor (GAA NSFET) is assessed in detail at sub-5-nm nodes for digital and analog/RF applications. The gate length (L-G) is downscaled from 20 nm to 5 nm to analyse the various DC and analog/RF performance metrics by fixing the remaining device design parameters. When L-G is downscaled from 20 nm to 5 nm, I (ON) is improved by 2.1x, I (OFF) increases by three orders in magnitude, SS increases by 27%, DIBL is increased by 4x, and a V-th roll off of 41 mV is noticed. Further, an enhancement of 3.65x was noticed in cut-off frequency (f (T)) with downscaling of L-G from 20 nm to 5 nm. On top of that, the circuit level performance is analysed with L-G scaling. The lookup table based Verilog-A model is used in the Cadence Virtuoso tool to demonstrate the circuit performance. The CMOS inverter and ring oscillator's performance was studied in detail with L-G scaling. With L-G scaling from 20 nm to 5 nm, the inverter performance metrics like switching current (I (SC)) is increased by 3.87x, propagation delay (tau(P)), energy delay product (EDP) and power delay product (PDP) are reduced by 65%, 5.5x and 1.95x respectively. Moreover, the ring oscillator offers superior performance with an oscillation frequency (f (OSC)) of 98.05 GHz when L-G is scaled to 5 nm, which is 157% more than f (OSC) at L-G of 20 nm. Thus, with downscaling DC performance degraded due to the SCEs. However, the RF performance of the device improved with downscaling of L-G towards lower nodes. Thus, the analyses reveal the scaling capability of NSFET at both device and circuit levels for sub-5-nm nodes.