Electrical characteristic and power consumption fluctuations of trapezoidal bulk FinFET devices and circuits induced by random line edge roughness

In this work, we use an experimentally calibrated 3D quantum-mechanically-corrected device simulation to study different types of line edge roughness (LER) on the DC/AC and digital circuit characteristic variability of 14-nm-gate HKMG trapezoidal bulk FinFETs. By using a time-domain Gaussian noise function as the LER-profile generator, we compare four types of LER: fin-LER inclusive of resist-LER and spacer-LER, sidewall-LER, and gate-LER for the trapezoidal bulk FinFETs. The resist-LER is most influential on characteristic fluctuation. For the same type, spacer-LER has at least 85 % improvement on σV
_th
compared with resist-LER. As for the digital circuit characteristic, the rectangle-shape bulk FinFET has larger timing fluctuation.