On the Resiliency of NC-FinFET SRAMs against Variation: MFIS Structure

This work investigates, for the first time, the impact of different variability sources on the reliability of SRAMs implemented using the Negative Capacitance FinFET (NC-FinFET) technology in comparison to the baseline conventional FinFET technology. Unlike the existing state of the art, our investigation is for NC-FinFETs constructed in a Metal–Ferroelectric–Insulator–Semiconductor (MFIS) structure. Our analysis is based on calibrated TCAD simulations in which baseline FinFETs are calibrated to reproduce Intel 14nm measurements for both I-V characteristics and variation. NC parameters were extracted by fitting the Landau model to an experimentally-measured S shaped polarization-electric field curve. Our key focus is on revealing the individual and combined impact of variability sources on the noise margins of SRAMs. We demonstrate that NC-FinFETs based SRAMs exhibit a higher immunity against variation due to the better electrostatic integrity caused by NC.