Impact of Radiation on Negative Capacitance FinFET

This is the first work to investigate the susceptibility of Negative Capacitance Field-Effect Transistor (NC-FET) to radiation. Using TCAD models, which are well calibrated with 14nm production quality nFinFET and pFinFET devices, the impact of heavy-ions at various intensities on NC-FinFET and baseline (counterpart) FinFET is studied in mixed-mode simulations. Our analysis demonstrates that NC-FinFET exhibits a higher resiliency to radiation than the baseline FinFET in which a smaller voltage drop and faster recovery are observed after a particle strike. This is due to the internal voltage amplification provided by the ferroelectric (FE) layer integrated within the transistor gate stack. However, for low-power applications in which NC-FinFET operates at a reduced voltage (i.e., voltage that is lower than the baseline V
_dd
, yet it is still sufficient to provide the same ON-current as in the baseline FinFET), NC-FinFET inverter shows higher susceptibility to radiation than the baseline FinFET.