Gate-All-Around FETs: Nanowire and Nanosheet Structure

Abstract

DC/AC performances of 3-nm-node gate-all-around (GAA) FETs having different widths and the number of channels (Nch) from 1 to 5 were investigated thoroughly using fully-calibrated TCAD. There are two types of GAAFETs: nanowire (NW) FETs having the same width (WNW) and thickness of the channels, and nanosheet (NS) FETs having wide width (WNS) but the fixed thickness of the channels as 5 nm. Compared to FinFETs, GAAFETs can maintain good short channel characteristics as the WNW is smaller than 9 nm but irrespective of the WNS. DC performances of the GAAFETs improve as the Nch increases but at decreasing rate because of the parasitic resistances at the source/drain epi. On the other hand, gate capacitances of the GAAFETs increase constantly as the Nch increases. Therefore, the GAAFETs have minimum RC delay at the Nch near 3. For low power applications, NWFETs outperform FinFETs and NSFETs due to their excellent short channel characteristics by 2-D structural confinement. For standard and high performance applications, NSFETs outperform FinFETs and NWFETs by showing superior DC performances arising from larger effective widths per footprint. Overall, GAAFETs are great candidates to substitute FinFETs in the 3-nm technology node for all the applications.