Steep switching tunnel FET: A promise to extend the energy efficient roadmap for post-CMOS digital and analog/RF applications

Steep switching Tunnel FETs (TFET) can extend the supply voltage scaling with improved energy efficiency for both digital and analog/RF application. In this paper, recent approaches on III-V Tunnel FET device design, prototype device demonstration, modeling techniques and performance evaluations for digital and analog/RF application are discussed and compared to CMOS technology. The impact of steep switching, uni-directional conduction and negative differential resistance characteristics are explored from circuit design perspective. Circuit-level implementation such as III-V TFET based Adder and SRAM design shows significant improvement on energy efficiency and power reduction below 0.3V for digital application. The analog/RF metric evaluation is presented including g_m/I_ds metric, temperature sensitivity, parasitic impact and noise performance. TFETs exhibit promising performance for high frequency, high sensitivity and ultra-low power RF rectifier application.