3596 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES, VOL. 60, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2013
Comparative Leakage Analysis of GeOI FinFET
and Ge Bulk FinFET
Vita Pi-Ho Hu, Member, IEEE, Ming-Long Fan, Student Member, IEEE,
Pin Su, Member, IEEE, and Ching-Te Chuang, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— We present a comparative leakage analysis of
germanium-on-insulator (GeOI) FinFET and germanium on bulk
substrate FinFET (Ge bulk FinFET) at device and circuit levels.
Band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) leakage-induced bipolar effect is
found to result in an amplified BTBT leakage for GeOI FinFET.
Device and circuit designs to mitigate the amplified BTBT leakage
of GeOI FinFETs are suggested. The effectiveness of various
high threshold voltage technology options including increasing
channel doping, increasing gate length and drain-side underlap
for leakage reduction is analyzed.
Index Terms— Band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) leakage,
FinFET, germanium, germanium-on-insulator (GeOI).
I. I NTRODUCTION
F
inFET has emerged as the prime candidate for extremely
scaled MOSFETs due to its superior control of short-
channel effects (SCEs) [1]–[3]. Germanium device offers high
mobility [4]–[8]. However, due to its high permittivity and
low bandgap, germanium device suffers from SCE and severe
band-to-band tunneling (BTBT) leakage. Combining the
advantages of the FinFET structure and the high mobility of
Ge becomes a promising approach for future high-performance
MOSFETs [9]–[12]. Si-on-insulator (SOI) FinFET and Si
bulk FinFET have been studied [13]–[15], and the results
showed that Si FinFET on bulk substrate with an optimized
punch through stopper (PTS) doping [16] underneath the
channel region can exhibit comparable performance and
leakage with that on SOI substrate. However, a comparative
leakage analysis between germanium-on-insulator (GeOI)
FinFET and Ge bulk FinFET has rarely been seen.
In this work, the BTBT leakage current in the GeOI FinFET
is shown to be amplified due to the bipolar effect, and various
device design strategies for mitigating the bipolar gain (β) and
leakage current of GeOI FinFETs are examined. This work is
organized as follows. Section II describes the device design,
simulation methodology, and device characteristics. Section III
investigates the device and circuit designs to suppress the
Manuscript received April 17, 2013; accepted August 7, 2013. Date of
publication September 4, 2013; date of current version September 18, 2013.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan
under Contract NSC 100-2628-E-009-024-MY2 and Contract NSC 102-2911-
I-009-302 (I-RiCE), and in part by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan under
ATU Program. The review of this brief was arranged by Editor W. Tsai.
The authors are with the Department of Electronics Engineering and
Institute of Electronics, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010,
Taiwan (e-mail: vitabee.ee93g@nctu.edu.tw; pinsu@faculty.nctu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TED.2013.2278032
Fig. 1. Schematic view of GeOI and Ge bulk FinFETs, and device parameters
used in this work. For Ge bulk FinFET, the PTS doping (N
PTS
) is adjusted
to have comparable subthreshold swing compared with the GeOI FinFET.
FinFETs
GeOI
1E-7
1E-5
A)
Ge Bulk
Vds=1V,0.05V
1E-9 1E-3
Vth+1V ( μA/μ m)
Experimental data
TCAD
Ids(A
1E-11
-1.2 -1.0 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4
1E-5
1E-4
Ileak@Vgs=V
Vds (V)
pFET
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Vgs(V)
Fig. 2. I
ds
versus V
gs
characteristics of GeOI and Ge bulk FinFETs. Ge bulk
FinFET uses PTS to control the subthreshold leakage. GeOI FinFET shows
different I
off
compared with the Ge bulk FinFET at V
ds
= 1 V. Inset: BTBT
leakage current calibration at various V
ds
[19].
amplified BTBT leakage due to the BTBT-induced bipolar
effect. Section IV is the conclusion.
II. DEVICE DESIGN AND TCAD
SIMULATION METHODOLOGY
Fig. 1 shows the schematics of the GeOI and Ge bulk
FinFETs and the device parameters used in this work. The
PTS doping (N
PTS
) of the Ge bulk FinFET is adjusted to
have comparable subthreshold swing compared with the GeOI
FinFET, as shown in Fig. 2.
0018-9383 © 2013 IEEE