Understanding the Potential and Limitations of Tunnel FETs for Low-Voltage Analog/Mixed-Signal Circuits

作者：Settino Francesco; Lanuzza Marco^*; Strangio Sebastiano; Crupi Felice; Palestri Pierpaolo; Esseni David; Selmi Luca

来源：IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2017, 64(6): 2736-2743.

DOI：10.1109/TED.2017.2689746

• Analog circuits
• analog figures of merit
• comparators
• track and hold (T/H)
• tunnel FET (TFET)

In this paper, the analog/mixed-signal performance is evaluated at device and circuit levels for a III-V nanowire tunnel field effect transistor (TFET) technology platform and compared against the predictive model for FinFETs at the 10-nm technology node. The advantages and limits of TFETs over their FinFET counterparts are discussed in detail, considering the main analog figures of merits, as well as the implementation of low-voltage track-and-hold (T/H) and comparator circuits. It is found that the higher output resistance offered by TFET-based designs allows achieving significantly higher intrinsic voltage gain and higher maximum-oscillation frequency at low current levels. TFET-based T/H circuits have better accuracy and better hold performance by using the dummy switch solution for the mitigation of the charge injection. Among the comparator circuits, the TFET-based conventional dynamic architecture exhibits the best performance while keeping lower area occupation with respect to the more complex double-tail circuits. Moreover, it outperforms all the FinFET counterparts over a wide range of supply voltage when considering low values of the common-mode voltage.

• 出版日期2017-6