Motivated by emerging battery-operated applications that demand intensive computation in portable environments, techniques are investigated which reduce power consumption in CMOS digital circuits while maintaining computational throughput. Techniques for low-power operation are shown which use the lowest possible supply voltage coupled with architectural, logic style, circuit, and technology optimizations. An architecturally based scaling strategy is presented which indicates that the optimum voltage is much lower than that determined by other scaling considerations. This optimum is achieved by trading increased silicon area for reduced power consumption. >

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Low-power CMOS digital design

An object is to provide a semiconductor device of which a manufacturing process is not complicated and by which cost can be suppressed, by forming a thin film transistor using an oxide semiconductor film typified by zinc oxide, and a manufacturing method thereof. For the semiconductor device, a gate electrode is formed over a substrate; a gate insulating film is formed covering the gate electrode; an oxide semiconductor film is formed over the gate insulating film; and a first conductive film and a second conductive film are formed over the oxide semiconductor film. The oxide semiconductor film has at least a crystallized region in a channel region.

Semiconductor device, and manufacturing method thereof

An electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM) having a non conducting charge trapping dielectric, such as silicon nitride, sandwiched between two silicon dioxide layers acting as electrical insulators is disclosed. The invention includes a method of programming, reading and erasing the EEPROM device. The non conducting dielectric layer functions as an electrical charge trapping medium. A conducting gate layer is placed over the upper silicon dioxide layer. The memory device is programmed in the conventional manner, using hot electron programming, by applying programming voltages to the gate and the drain while the source is grounded. Hot electrons are accelerated sufficiently to be injected into the region of the trapping dielectric layer near the drain. The device, however, is read in the opposite direction from which it was written, meaning voltages are applied to the gate and the source while the drain is grounded. Application of relatively low gate voltages combined with reading in the reverse direction greatly reduces the potential across the trapped charge region. This permits much shorter programming times by amplifying the effect of the charge trapped in the localized trapping region. In addition, the memory cell can be erased by applying suitable erase voltages to the gate and the drain so as to cause electrons to be removed from the charge trapping region of the nitride layer. Similar to programming, a narrower charge trapping region enables much faster erase cycles.

Two bit non-volatile electrically erasable and programmable semiconductor memory cell utilizing asymmetrical charge trapping

Performance of deep-submicrometer very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits is being increasingly dominated by the interconnects due to decreasing wire pitch and increasing die size. Additionally, heterogeneous integration of different technologies in one single chip is becoming increasingly desirable, for which planar (two-dimensional) ICs may not be suitable. This paper analyzes the limitations of the existing interconnect technologies and design methodologies and presents a novel three-dimensional (3-D) chip design strategy that exploits the vertical dimension to alleviate the interconnect related problems and to facilitate heterogeneous integration of technologies to realize a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. A comprehensive analytical treatment of these 3-D ICs has been presented and it has been shown that by simply dividing a planar chip into separate blocks, each occurring a separate physical level interconnected by short and vertical interlayer interconnects (VILICs), significant improvement in performance and reduction in wire-limited chip area can be achieved, without the aid of any other circuit or design innovations. A scheme to optimize the interconnect distribution among different interconnect tiers is presented and the effect of transferring the repeaters to upper Si layers has been quantified in this analysis for a two-layer 3-D chip. Furthermore, one of the major concerns in 3-D ICs arising due to power dissipation problems has been analyzed and an analytical model has been presented to estimate the temperatures of the different active layers. It is demonstrated that advancement in heat sinking technology will be necessary in order to extract maximum performance from these chips. Implications of 3-D device architecture on several design issues have also been discussed with special attention to SoC design strategies. Finally some of the promising technologies for manufacturing 3-D ICs have been outlined.

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3-D ICs: a novel chip design for improving deep-submicrometer interconnect performance and systems-on-chip integration

Scaling the Si MOSFET is reconsidered. Requirements on subthreshold leakage control force conventional scaling to use high doping as the device dimension penetrates into the deep-submicrometer regime, leading to an undesirably large junction capacitance and degraded mobility. By studying the scaling of fully depleted SOI devices, the important concept of controlling horizontal leakage through vertical structures is highlighted. Several structural variations of conventional SOI structures are discussed in terms of a natural length scale to guide the design. The concept of vertical doping engineering can also be realized in bulk Si to obtain good subthreshold characteristics without large junction capacitance or heavy channel doping. >

Scaling the Si MOSFET: from bulk to SOI to bulk

A 38-ns, 257-mW, 16*16-b CMOS multiplier with a supply voltage of 4 V is described A complementary pass-transistor logic (CPL) is proposed and applied to almost the entire critical path The CPL consists of complementary inputs/outputs, an nMOS pass-transistor logic network, and CMOS output inverters The CPL is twice as fast as conventional CMOS due to lower input capacitance and high logic functionality Its multiplication time is the fastest ever reported, even for bipolar and GaAs ICs, and it can be enhanced further to 26 ns with 60 mW at 77 K >

A 3.8-ns CMOS 16*16-b multiplier using complementary pass-transistor logic

Describes circuit techniques for fabricating a high-speed adder using pass-transistor logic. Double pass-transistor logic (DPL) is shown to improve circuit performance at reduced supply voltage. Its symmetrical arrangement and double-transmission characteristics improve the gate speed without increasing the input capacitance. A carry propagation circuit technique called conditional carry selection (CCS) is shown to resolve the problem of series-connected pass transistors in the carry propagation path. By combining these techniques, the addition time of a 32-b ALU can be reduced by 30% from that of an ordinary CMOS ALU. A 32-b ALU test chip is fabricated in 0.25- mu m CMOS technology using these circuit techniques and is capable of an addition time of 1.5 ns at a supply voltage of 2.5 V. >

A 1.5-ns 32-b CMOS ALU in double pass-transistor logic

A 54/spl times/54-b multiplier using pass-transistor multiplexers has been fabricated by 0.25 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. To enhance the speed performance, a new 4-2 compressor and a carry lookahead adder (CLA), both featuring pass-transistor multiplexers, have been developed. The new circuits have a speed advantage over conventional CMOS circuits because the number of critical-path gate stages is minimized due to the high logic functionality of pass-transistor multiplexers. The active size of the 54/spl times/54-b multiplier is 3.77/spl times/3.41 mm. The multiplication time is 4.4 ns at a 3.5-V power supply. >

A 4.4 ns CMOS 54/spl times/54-b multiplier using pass-transistor multiplexer

Herein disclosed is a semiconductor integrated circuit device comprising a SRAM having its memory cell composed of transfer MISFETs to be controlled through word lines and drive MISFETs. The gate electrodes of the drive MISFETs and the gate electrodes of the transfer MISFETs of the memory cell, and the word lines are individually formed of different conductive layers. The drive MISFETs and the transfer MISFETs are individually arranged to cross each other in the gate length direction. The word lines are extended in the gate length direction of the gate electrodes of the drive MISFETs and caused to cross the gate electrodes of the drive MISFETs partially. The two transfer MISFETs of the memory cell have their individual gate electrodes connected with two respective word lines spaced from each other and extended in an identical direction. The region defined by the two word lines is arranged therein with the two drive MISFETs and the source lines. The source line is formed of a conductive layer identical to that of the word line. The individual data lines of the complementary data line are formed of an identical conductive layer which is different from that of the word line and the source line. The identical conductive layer between the word line and source line and the complementary data line is formed with two word lines: a main word line extended in the first direction identical to that of the word line and source line and used by adopting the divided word line system: and a sub-word line used by adopting the double word line system.

SRAM having load transistor formed above driver transistor

A comb-like or dot-like phase shifter pattern is added to a phase shifter used in phase shifting mask technology, which is then exposed onto a wafer. This enables the formation of extremely fine line patterns or space patterns having widths different from each other simultaneously. Further, when two reticles are disposed such that phase shifter patterns disposed therein intersect each other and are exposed consecutively onto a wafer, a fine hole pattern or dot pattern can be formed at a position where the phase shifter patterns intersect each other.

Toshiaki Yamanaka

Papers

A 3.8-ns CMOS 16*16-b multiplier using complementary pass-transistor logic

A 1.5-ns 32-b CMOS ALU in double pass-transistor logic

A 4.4 ns CMOS 54/spl times/54-b multiplier using pass-transistor multiplexer

SRAM having load transistor formed above driver transistor

Method of forming a pattern