Experimental characterization of the static noise margins of strained silicon complementary tunnel-FET SRAM

Half SRAM cells with strained Si nanowire complementary Tunnel-FETs (CTFET) have been fabricated to explore the capability of TFETs for 6T-SRAM. Static measurements on cells with outward faced n-TFET access transistors have been performed to determine the SRAM butterfly curves, allowing the assessment of cell functionality and stability. The forward p-i-n leakage at certain bias configuration of the access transistor may lead to malfunctioning storage operation, even without the contribution of the ambipolar behavior. Lowering the bit-line bias is found to mitigate such effect resulting in functional hold, read and write operation.