Experimental Extraction of Thermal Noise γ Factors in a 14-nm RF FinFET technology

Abstract

This paper experimentally extracts the extrinsic and intrinsic thermal noise γ factors in a 14-nm FinFET technology. The intrinsic γ in saturation operation is found to be close to 1 for the minimum L (16nm) transistors, which is surprisingly low compared to the long channel limit of 2/3. We attribute this low noise factor to the excellent gate control of these FinFETs that makes the transistor exhibit relatively long channel thermal noise behavior at minimum gate length.