Subthreshold Analog/RF Performance Enhancement of Underlap DG FETs With High-k Spacer for Low Power Applications

This paper presents a systematic study of the subthreshold analog/RF performance for underlap double gate (UDG) NMOSFETs using high dielectric constant (k) spacers. The conventional UDG-NMOSFETs offer reduced short-channel effects along with improved subthreshold analog/RF performance at a cost of higher distributed channel resistance and low on current. In this paper, we show that these drawbacks can be alleviated effectively by using high-k spacers without any severe degradation in the subthreshold analog/RF performance. In order to show the improvement in the device performance, we have studied the effect of high-k spacers on different subthreshold analog figures of merit such as the transconductance, transconductance generation factor, output resistance, and the intrinsic gain for different values of k. Moreover, we have analyzed the RF performance as a function of intrinsic capacitance and resistance, transport delay, inductance, cutoff frequency, and the maximum oscillation frequency. In order to assess the gain bandwidth (GBW) product, the circuit implementation of the UDG-NMOSFETs with different high-k spacers was performed on a common source amplifier. Our results show an improvement in the GBW of about 38% for the devices with high-k spacers compared to its low-k counterpart.