Evaluation of single event upset susceptibility of FinFET-based SRAMs with weak resistive defects

Fin Field-Efect Transistor (FinFET) technology enables the continuous downscaling of Integrated Circuits (ICs), using the Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology in accordance with the More Moore domain. Despite demonstrating improvements on short channel efect and overcoming the g...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Copetti, Thiago Santos, Medeiros, Guilherme Cardoso, Taouil, Mottaqiallah, Hamdioui, Said, Poehls, Leticia Maria Bolzani, Balen, Tiago Roberto
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:Brasil
Recursos:Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Repositorio:Repositório Institucional da UFRGS
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:www.lume.ufrgs.br:10183/256500
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10183/256500
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Microeletrônica
Memória (Informática)
Detecção de falhas
SRAMs
FinFET
Resistive defects
TCAD
SEU
Reliability
Single event transient modeling
Descrição
Resumo:Fin Field-Efect Transistor (FinFET) technology enables the continuous downscaling of Integrated Circuits (ICs), using the Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology in accordance with the More Moore domain. Despite demonstrating improvements on short channel efect and overcoming the growing leakage problem of planar CMOS technology, the continuity of feature size miniaturization tends to increase sensitivity to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) caused by ionizing particles, especially in blocks with higher transistor densities such as Static Random-Access Memories (SRAMs). Variation during the manufacturing process has introduced diferent types of defects that directly afect the SRAM’s reliability, such as weak resistive defects. As some of these defects may cause dynamic faults, which require more than one consecutive operation to sensitize the fault at the logic level, traditional test approaches may fail to detect them, and test escapes may occur. These undetected faults, associated with weak resistive defects, may afect the FinFET-based SRAM reliability during its lifetime. In this context, this paper proposes to investigate the impact of ionizing particles on the reliability of FinFET-based SRAMs in the presence of weak resistive defects. Firstly, a TCAD model of a FinFET-based SRAM cell is proposed allowing the evaluation of the ionizing particle’s impact. Then, SPICE simulations are performed considering the current pulse parameters obtained with TCAD. In this step, weak resistive defects are injected into the FinFET-based SRAM cell. Results show that weak defects can positively or negatively infuence the cell reliability against SEUs caused by ionizing particles.