The aggressive downscaling of complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) technology is facing great challenges to overcome severe short-channel effects. Multigate MOSFETs are one of the most promising candidates for scaling beyond Si CMOS, due to better electrostatic control as compared to conventional planar MOSFETs.
Conventional dry etching-induced surface damage is one of the main sources of performance degradation for multigate transistors, especially for III-V high mobility materials. It is also challenging to increase the fin aspect ratio by dry etching because of the non-ideal anisotropic etching profile. Here, we report a novel method, inverse metal-assisted chemical etching (i-MacEtch), in lieu of conventional RIE etching, for 3D fin channel formation. InP junctionless FinFETs with record high-aspect-ratio (~ 50:1) fins are demonstrated by this method for the first time. The i-MacEtch process flow eliminates dry-etching-induced plasma damage, high energy ion implantation damage, and high temperature annealing, allowing for the fabrication of InP fin channels with atomically smooth sidewalls. The sidewall features resulting from this unique and simplified process ensure high interface quality between high-k dielectric layer and InP fin channel. Experimental and theoretical analyses show that high-aspect-ratio FinFETs, which could deliver more current per area under much relaxed horizontal geometry requirements, are promising in pushing the technology node ahead where conventional scaling has met its physical limits.
The performance of the FinFET was further investigated through numerical simulation. A new kind of FinFET with asymmetric gate and source/drain contacts has been proposed and simulated. By benchmarking with conventional symmetric FinFET, better short-channel behavior with much higher current density is confirmed. The design guidelines are provided. The overall circuit delay can be minimized by optimizing gate lengths according to different local parasites among circuits in interconnection-delay-dominated SoC applications.
Continued transistor scaling requires even stronger gate electrostatic control over the channel. The ultimate scaling structure would be gate-all-around nanowire MOSFETs. We demonstrate III-V junctionless gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire (NW) MOSFETs for the first time. For the first time, source/drain (S/D) resistance and thermal budget are minimized by regrowth using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) in III-V MOSFETs. The fabricated short-channel (Lg=80 nm) GaAs GAA NWFETs with extremely narrow nanowire width (WNW= 9 nm) show excellent transconductance (gm) linearity at biases (300 mV), characterized by the high third intercept point (2.6 dBm). The high linearity is especially important for low power applications because it is insensitive to bias conditions
