Sensitivity and Reliability Assessment of a Strained Silicon Junctionless FinFET-based Hydrogen Gas Sensor

The miniaturized and non-planar emerging FET-based sensors are in high demand owing to their intrinsic properties of steep switching characteristics, low power need, and higher sensitivity. However, they suffer from various reliability concerns, which require timely attention. In this paper, we employed Junctionless (JL) FinFET as a hydrogen (H2) gas sensor, which is already characterized for transient conditions in our previous publication. Using well-calibrated TCAD models, we thoroughly investigated (i) the impact of strained silicon on the sensitivity of the targeted JL-FinFET-based H2 sensor; (ii) the inclusion of the high mobility performance techniques to modulate the piezo resistance of strained JL (SJL) FinFET; (iii) the role of metal gate granularities (MGG) on SJL-FinFET sensing performance; and finally (iv) the early aging, i.e., end-of-lifetime (EOL) of the sensor using threshold voltage (a sensing metric) shift by ±50mV. Thus, it is worth analyzing the robustness of an H2 sensor for a strained FET-based sensor.