NBTI in FinFET Circuits under the Temperature Effect Inversion

FinFET technology has increasingly been adopted for use within integrated circuits thanks to its superior electrical integrity and scalability. However, most recent studies have concluded that FinFET circuits tend to be more vulnerable to negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) compared to planar MOSFET designs as a result of the self-heating effect. In this paper, we contrarily reveal that under strong NBTI stress from increased temperature, the temperature effect inversion (TEI) in small nanometer FinFET devices significantly improves the circuit performance. From experimental results, at high temperature, the TEI impact dominates the delay degradation due to NBTI causing almost all of the experimental FinFET circuits to run faster.