Comparative Study of Silicon-on-Nothing and III–V-on-Nothing Architecture for High Speed and Low Power Analog and RF/Digital Applications

This paper investigates the impact of channel material engineering on the performance of silicon-on-nothing (SON) architecture for 32-nm technology node. The analog performance of SON architecture in terms of drive current I_ds, transconductance (g_m), early voltage V_ea, trans-conductance generation efficiency g_m/I_ds, and output resistance R_out with different channel material, i.e., Si, SiGe, Ge, GaAs, and InP has been investigated by using ATLAS 3D device simulation. The impact of temperature variation on the analog performance of the device has also been studied. Due to high mobility channel material (i.e., for III-V-based MOSFET), device shows excellent performance for microwave application because of its high current gain (h21), unilateral power gain, and maximum available power gain G_ma. Furthermore, the impact of high mobility channel material on the digital performance of the device has also been investigated by monitoring the CMOS inverter characteristics, i.e., voltage transfer characteristics and noise margin.