Efficient characterization and suppression methodology of edge effects for leakage current reduction of sub-40nm DRAM device

With the process scaling, the leakage current reduction has been the primary design concerns in a nanometer-era VLSI circuit. In this paper, we propose a new lithography process-aware edge effects correction method to reduce the leakage current in the shallow trench isolation (STI). We construct the various test structures to model I
leakage
and I
leakage_fringe
which represent the leakage currents at the center and edge of the transistor, respectively. The layout near the active edge is modified using the look-up table generated by the calibrated analytic model. On average, the proposed edge effects correction method reduces the leakage current by 18% with the negligible decrease of the drive current at sub-40nm DRAM device.