Gate capacitance attenuation in MOS devices with thin gate dielectrics

Abstract

As gate oxides become thinner, in conjunction with scaling of MOS technologies, a discrepancy arises between the gate oxide capacitance and the total gate capacitance, due to the increasing importance of the carrier distributions in the silicon and polysilicon electrodes. For the first time, we quantitatively explore the combined impact of degenerate carrier statistics, quantum effects, and the semiconducting nature of the gate electrode on gate capacitance. Only by including all of these effects can we successfully model the capacitance-voltage behavior of sub-10 nm MOS capacitors. For typical devices, we find the gate capacitance to be 10% less than the oxide capacitance, but it can be attenuated by 25% or more for 4 nm oxides with polysilicon gates doped to less than 10/sup 20/ cm/sup -3/.