Radiation Hardness on Dielectric/Ferroelectric Stacked Negative Capacitance Multigate Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor FETs at Sub-3-nm Technology Node: Device to CMOS Inverter Layout

Abstract

In this work, for the first time, we present a proper comparison of radiation effects on the dielectric/ferroelectric (FE) stacked negative capacitance (NC) FinFETs and nanosheet (NS) FETs at the sub-3-nm technology node, providing a performance benchmark in device and CMOS inverter cell. The impact of heavy ion particle strikes is analyzed for various directions (top, channel, and lateral strikes), 30 locations, and 5 inclined angles to identify the most critical strike scenarios causing performance degradation. The NC-NSFET demonstrates superior radiation resilience across all strike conditions compared to the NC-FinFET. A detailed circuit-level evaluation of a CMOS inverter layout shows that NC-NSFETs can tolerate total ionizing dosages (TID) up to $25~\text {MeV}\cdot \text {cm}^{{2}}$ /mg, whereas NC-FinFETs fail at $20~\text {MeV}\cdot \text {cm}^{{2}}$ /mg indicating that the NC-NSFETs sustain nearly double the dosage compared to NC-FinFETs. These findings highlight the robustness of NC-NSFETs, making them a preferred choice for applications in radiation-rich environments such as spacecraft electronics, high-altitude avionics, nuclear reactors, and medical devices.