High-performance 0.07-μm CMOS with 9.5-ps gate delay and 150 GHzfT

We report room-temperature 0.07-μm CMOS inverter delays of 13.6 ps at 1.5 V and 9.5 ps at 2.5 V for an SOI substrate; 16 ps at 1.5 V and 12 ps at 2.5 V for a bulk substrate. This is the first room-temperature sub-10 ps inverter ring oscillator delay ever reported. PFETs with very high drive current and reduction in parasitic resistances and capacitances for both NFETs and PFETs, realized by careful thermal budget optimization, contribute to the fast device speed. Moreover, the fast inverter delay was achieved without compromising the device short-channel characteristics. At V_dd=1.5 V and I_off ~2.5 nA/μm, minimum L_eff is about 0.085 μm for NFETs and 0.068 μm for PFETs. PFET I_on is 360 μA/μm, which is the highest value ever reported at comparable V_dd and I_off. The SOI MOSFET has about one order of magnitude higher I_off than a bulk MOSFET due to the floating-body effect. At around 0.07 μm L_eff, the NFET cut-off frequencies are 150 GHz for SOI and 135 GHz for bulk. These performance figures suggest that subtenth-micron CMOS is ready for multi-gigahertz digital circuits, and has good potential for RF and microwave applications