Impact of Strain on ESD Robustness of FinFET Devices

The ESD performance of gated FinFET diodes and multi-gate NMOS devices in both active MOS-diode and parasitic-bipolar mode are investigated, highlighting the impact of strained SiN layers. Strain improves the ESD robustness up to 30% in multi-fin FinFETs. A different failure mechanism is discovered in strained NMOS FinFETs for the parasitic-bipolar mode.