The impact of process-induced mechanical stress on d-latch timing performance

In this work we studied the impact of number of fingers in strain engineered MFGSs on the performance of sequential circuits designed using multi-finger gate structures (MFGSs) and following different layout scenarios. We studied the stress induced in the channel of MFGSs by decoupling different stress sources and dependence of channel stress on the layout of gate structures. Subsequently we study the layout dependent effect (LDE) variability due to the use of stressors. We study the impact of LDE variability on the set-up time of static and dynamic latches. We observe that the set-up time changes by ~15% when the number of fingers is increased from from one to ten in MFGSs. We observe that the use of dummy poly reduces the variability due to stressors though, at the cost of area and performance.