Lateral silicon nanowire based standard cell design for higher performance

Abstract

At deep nano-scale nodes Silicon Nanowire field effect transistor (SiNW FET) imparts best performance. However, analysis of SiNW FET based circuit design is lacking in existing literature. In this study, we design a standard cell library for advanced 10nm lateral SiNW FET technology in super threshold regime. For this, we create a Verilog-A compact model. Our compact Verilog-A model includes all the short channel effect as well as the geometrical dependent parasitics, which are crucial for short channel devices. The model is well calibrated with TCAD and reported fabricated data. The standard cell library developed comprise INVERTER, NAND, and NOR gate cells. Finally, we compared the standard cell performance to FinFET based standard cell. We found that the Si NW CMOS based standard cells have ∼3–4X, ∼2–3X, and 3X performance in terms of power dissipation, energy-delay product and power delay product respectively compared to FinFET based designs.