Evaluation of threshold voltage dispersion in 45 nm CMOS technology with TCAD-based sensitivity analysis

We propose an approach based on sensitivity analysis to evaluate threshold voltage variability of nanoscale MOSFETs due to line edge roughness (LER) and to random discrete dopants (RDD). It requires a very limited number of TCAD simulations, corresponding to computational load much smaller than that required for statistical simulations. We apply our approach to 45 nm CMOS technology, and show that with only few tens of device simulations one can obtain results comparable to those of statistical simulations, with an improved understanding of the impact of physical parameters on the variability of electrical characteristics.