A Tunnel Diode Body Contact Structure for High-Performance SOI MOSFETs

A tunnel diode body contact (TDBC) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFET structure without floating-body effects (FBEs) is proposed and successfully demonstrated. The key idea of the proposed structure is that a tunnel diode is embedded in the source region, so that the accumulated carriers can be released through tunneling. In an n-MOSFET, a heavily doped p⁺ layer is introduced beneath the n⁺ source region. The simulated and measured results show the suppressed FBE, as expected. Other phenomena that originate from the FBEs, such as the kink, linear kink effect, abnormal subthreshold swing, and small drain-tosource breakdown voltage in the properties, were also sufficiently suppressed. In addition, it should be noted that the proposed SOI MOSFETs are fully laid out and process compatible with SOI CMOS. Hysteresis effects disappear in TDBC SOI MOSFETs, which makes them attractive for digital applications. On the other hand, in analog applications, TDBC SOI MOSFETs are shown to hold the advantage over floating-body SOI MOSFETs due to their higher Gm/ID ratio. TDBC SOI MOSFETs can be considered as one of the promising candidates for digital and analog devices.