Extremely-Low Threshold Voltage FinFET for 5G mmWave Applications
Ali Razavieh, Y. Chen, Tamilmani Ethirajan, Man Gu, S. Cimino, Takashi Shimizu, M. K. Hassan, T. Morshed, Jagar Singh, Wenhan Zheng, Vinayak Mahajan, H. T. Wang, T. H. Lee
Abstract
An optimized doping process is used to achieve extremely-low threshold voltage (ELVT) FinFETs for low-power mmWave applications based on 12nm node technology platform. With the VTH ≈ 100mV ELVT FinFET shows 15% IEFF improvement at the same VDD compared to its super-low threshold voltage (SLVT) counterpart, while mismatch and reliability performances are comparable. FT/FMAX of 305GHz/ 315GHz and comparable Maximum Stable Gain (MSG) to SLVT FinFET gives ELVT FinFET an advantage for mmWave 5G low-power applications. Local oscillator (LO) chain blocks are investigated as a circuit level example to confirm the benefits of ELVT FinFET. An optimized LO transmission Line (TL) driver using ELVT FinFETs results in 9% and 8% reduction in VDD and power consumption respectively at the same phase-noise (PN) level as the SLVT based design. If operated at the same V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DD</sub> of 0.525V ELVT FinFET can improve the VCO Figure of Merit (FOMVCO) by 2.8dB.