Insights into the operation of negative capacitance FinFET for low power logic applications

In the incessant search to overcome the power densities and energy efficient limitations, performance matrix of emerging electronic devices are being explored inevitably to find the alternatives of MOSFETs. We investigated and compared the delay and energy performance matrices of fin-shaped FET and negative capacitance FinFET (NC-FinFET) based devices and circuits designed on the same technology node. The improvement in the performance of NC-FinFET based CMOS circuits is enhanced due to the negative capacitance's negative DIBL by employing a industry standard BSIM-CMG model. After analyzing at the device-level, detailed evaluation is carried out at logic level for embedded inverter chain, three-stage ring oscillators (ROs), and 2-bit ripple carry adders (RCA) for frequencies ranging between 10 kHz–1 GHz. Our findings revealed that the NC-FinFET based circuit has a lower delay for a given range of operating frequencies and saves a significant amount of power when compared to baseline FinFET, making NC-FinFET desirable for low power digital logic applications.