High-κ/metal gate low power bulk technology - Performance evaluation of standard CMOS logic circuits, microprocessor critical path replicas, and SRAM for 45nm and beyond

This paper presents performance evaluation of high-κ/metal gate (HK/MG) process on an industry standard 45nm low power microprocessor built on bulk substrate. CMOS devices built with HK/MG demonstrate 50% improvement in NFET and 65% improvement in PFET drive current when compared with industry standard 45nm Poly/SiON devices. No additional stress elements were used for this performance gain. The critical path circuits of this low power microprocessor built with HK/MG show dynamic performance gain over 50% at same supply voltage and 36% lower dynamic energy at same performance. Superior SRAM minimum operating voltage characteristics are achieved due to Vt variability reduction from HK/MG. Analog circuit functionality is demonstrated by a fully integrated PLL circuitry without any modification to process.