Proposal for Capacitance Matching in Negative Capacitance Field-Effect Transistors

TLDR: A new approach using multi-layer FE to engineer the shape of negative-capacitance field-effect transistor is discussed, and the results show that it leads to better sub-threshold swing as well as lower power supply.

Abstract: Negative-capacitance transistors use ferroelectric (FE) material in the gate-stack to improve the transistor performance. The extent of the improvement depends on the capacitance matching between the FE capacitance ( ${C}_{\textsf {fe}}$ ) and the underlying MOS transistor ( ${C}_{\textsf {MOS}}$ ). Since both ${C}_{\textsf {MOS}}$ and ${C}_{\textsf {fe}}$ have strong non-linearity, it is difficult to achieve a good matching for the entire operating gate voltage range. In this letter, we discuss a new approach using multi-layer FE to engineer the shape of ${C}_{\textsf {fe}}$ . The proposed method is validated using the TCAD simulation of negative-capacitance FDSOI transistor, and the results show that it leads to better sub-threshold swing as well as lower power supply ${V}_{\textsf {dd}}$ compared with a prototype single-layer negative-capacitance field-effect transistor.