A First Insight to the Thermal Dependence of the DC, Analog and RF Performance of an S/D Spacer Engineered DG-Ambipolar FET

Abstract

This paper investigates for the first time the temperature dependence of the digital/analog parameters and RF figure of merits (FOMs) of a spacer based reconfigurable field-effect transistor (RFET) and compares the same with the existing RFET topology and other devices which depend on band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) for their on-current generation. It is observed that the output characteristics of the device are less sensitive to the temperature in the BTBT dominated on-state region as compared to the subthreshold one which is thermionic emission dependent. Having a better thermal stability over tunnel field effect transistor (TFET) and significantly lesser Vth roll-off, the proposed device portrays orders of magnitude reduction in parasitic gate capacitances and intrinsic delay as compared to gate-all-around (GAA) and hetero gate dielectric GAA TFET devices over the considered range of temperature, thus assuring higher switching speed for digital applications. Moreover, superior analog/RF performance is also exhibited by the device under consideration for all temperatures in contrast to SiGe, full silicon TFETs, and conventional RFET topology owing to higher BTBT dominance and better gate controllability. Apart from all of these performance gains, the device FOMs are found to be less sensitive to temperature variations making it more suitable for applications where temperature fluctuation is a major concern.