2.

1 Subthreshold Leakage Since the early days of the MOS transistor, its switching capability has been ex ploited by a wide variety of applications. By applying a high or low voltage on the gate contact, the current flow between source and drain can be switched on o r off, respectively. The off-state current was supposed to be very small, in fac t, early analytical models for the electrical behavior of MOS transistors like t he low-level SPICE models were even assuming a zero off-state current [37]. Comm only used equations for deriving the drain current were based on the well-known quadratic transfer curve of a MOS transistor. Below a certain gate-source voltag e, called ``threshold voltage'', the drain current was supposed to be zero. Surely, this has been a good approximation for quite some time when long channel s and high supply voltages were used. Then the semiconductor industry started sh rinking the devices to increase their density on a chip leading to a higher powe r dissipation since the active chip area stayed the same or was even increased t o benefit from a higher system complexity. Additionally, the electric fields in the device were constantly increasing because the voltage drops over the gate ox ide and the channel stayed the same while their sizes were reduced, leading to r eliability concerns. Consequently, the supply voltage was decreased to overcome these problems though the scaling method applied to the supply voltage has been much more conservativ e than the one for the device geometry [7,62]. The threshold voltage was decreas ed, accordingly, to maintain good driving capabilities. As a result, the off-state current gradually became a limiting factor for down-s caling the threshold voltage since it determines the power consumption of a chip in its idle state. It could not be ignored longer and new physical models had t o be applied to correctly describe the device behavior in the so-called subthres hold or weak-inversion regime [13,17,28]. Basically, three different regimes can be defined for the operation of a MOS tra nsistor. Based on the inversion condition of the channel, these regimes are call ed weak inversion, moderate inversion, and strong inversion. In general, two mec hanisms are responsible for the current flow: drift and diffusion. Under weak inversion the channel surface potential is almost constant across the channel and the current flow is determined by diffusion of minority carriers du e to a lateral concentration gradient. Under strong inversion there exists a thi n layer of minority carriers at the channel surface and a lateral electric field which causes a drift current. The moderate inversion regime is considered a tra nsition region between weak and strong inversion where both current flow mechani sms coincidently exist [65]. In the weak-inversion (or subthreshold) regime, the drain current depends expone ntially on the gate-source voltage [65] (2.1) where is the temperature voltage derived from (2.2) with being the Boltzmann constant, the absolute temperature, and the electron charge. The subthreshold slolpe factor of a long-channel uniformly doped device can be calculated using simple expressions for the gate and bulk capacitances and , r espectively (2.3) with (2.4) and

(2.5) In the latter equations and denote the dielectric constants of the oxide and s ilicon, respectively, is the depletion width under the channel, and is the gat e oxide thickness. The exponential subthreshold behavior can be explained by the exponential depend ence of the minority carrier density on the surface potential which, itself, is proportional to the gate voltage. On a semi-logarithmic scale the transfer (or - ) curve in the subthreshold regime will, therefore, be a straight line. The slope of this line is called ``subthreshold slope''. The inverse of this slo pe is usually referred to as ``subthreshold swing'' , given in units (mV/decade ) and can be derived from (2.1) (2.6) In this equation the factor results from the logarithmic scale with base 10 use d to extract the subthreshold swing. Due to the bulk effect the subthreshold swing of a conventional MOS transistor i n bulk technology will always be higher than a certain optimum value which is ro ughly 60 mV/dec at room temperature, and which can be calculated by setting equ al to 1 in (2.6) which means that the bulk effect is fully suppressed (2.7) In a realistic case will always be larger than 1. Therefore, the actual subthre shold swing will always be larger than depending on how well the channel surfa ce potential can be controlled by the gate contact. A small subthreshold swing is highly desired since it improves the ratio between the on- and off-currents. This requires that the bulk charge in the depletion r egion under the channel changes as little as possible when the gate voltage vari es, therefore should be small. Any additional bulk charge increases the voltage drop between the channel surface and the bulk contact, thus reducing the impact of the gate voltage on the surface potential. A small can be established by a light bulk doping under the channel since the depletion width in (2.4) is proportional to the inverse square root of the dopin g level: (2.8) with being twice the bulk Fermi potential. Fig. 2.1 shows a couple of transfer curves of a quarter-micron MOS transistor fo r different bulk doping levels. There exists a doping for which the subthreshold swing has an optimum. For higher doping levels the bulk effect becomes stronger like described above. Figure 2.1: Transfer curves of a 0.25 m MOS transistor for different bulk dopin g levels. The doping is varied from 10 cm to 10 cm with an exponent step siz e of 0.25. The drain voltage is 1.5 V. For very low doping levels this behavior is reversed, caused by an effect simila r to the punchthrough effect [74] explained in Section 2.2. To demonstrate this, two devices with different bulk doping levels are investigated in the weak inve rsion regime under a constant drain current condition of 46 pA. Device has a b ulk doping of 3.16 10 cm , Device has a bulk doping of 10 cm . Their operati ng points are indicated in Fig. 2.1.