Investigation of ambient temperature and thermal contact resistance induced self-heating effects in nanosheet FET

Abstract

Self-heating effect (SHE) is a severe issue in advanced nano-scaled devices such as stacked nanosheet field-effect transistors (NS-FET), which raises the device temperature (T D), that ultimately affects the key electrical characteristics, i.e. threshold voltage (V T), DIBL, subthreshold slope (SS), I OFF, I ON, etc. SHE puts design constraints in the advanced CMOS logic devices and circuits. In this paper, we thoroughly investigated the impact of ambient temperature and interface thermal contact resistance induced-self heating effect in the NS-FET using extensive numerical simulations. The weak electron–phonon coupling, phonon scattering, and the ambient temperature-induced joule energy directly coupled with thermal contact resistance cause the SHE-induced thermal degradation, which increases the device temperature (T D) and affects the device reliability. The baseline NS-FET is well-calibrated with the experimental data and 3D quantum corrected drift-diffusion coupled hydrodynamic and thermodynamic transport models is used in our TCAD framework to estimate the impact of ambient temperature and interface thermal contact resistance on the device performance. Moreover, we also evaluate the SHE-induced performance comparison of NS-FET with conventional FinFET and found that thermal degradation in NS-FET potentially worsen the electrical characteristics. Thus, a detailed TCAD analysis shows that the ambient temperature and interface thermal contact resistances deteriorate the effective thermal resistance (R eff) and device performance metrics.