A Boosting Pass Gate With Improved Switching Characteristics and No Overdriving for Programmable Routing Switch Based on Crystalline In-Ga-Zn-O Technology

A boosting pass gate (BPG) suitable for a programmable routing switch including a c-axis aligned crystal In-Ga-Zn-O (CAAC-IGZO) field effect transistor (FET) is proposed. The CAAC-IGZO is one of crystalline oxide semiconductors (OS). The proposed BPG (OS-based BPG, OS BPG) has a combination of a pass gate (PG) and a configuration memory (CM) cell utilizing a CAAC-IGZO FET with extremely low OFF-state current and a storage capacitor. This OS BPG achieves a routing switch with fewer transistors than a conventional routing switch having a combination of a PG and an static RAM (SRAM) cell. Owing to the boosting effect, the switching characteristics, at not only positive transition but also negative transition of input signals, of the OS BPG are improved without using overdriving. In circuits fabricated with a hybrid process of a CMOSFET and a CAAC-IGZO FET with gate lengths of 0.5 and 1.0 μm, the net delays of the OS BPG, 75 and 58 ns, at driving voltages of 2.0 and 2.5 V have been found to be less than those of the conventional routing switch (SRAM-based PG, SRAM PG) by about 79% and 62%, respectively. It has also been confirmed that a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip utilizing the OS BPG as a routing switch reduces the layout areas of routing switches and the whole chip by 61% and 22%, respectively, and increases the maximum operating frequencies at driving voltage of 2.0 and 2.5 V by about 2.8 times and 1.6 times of those of the FPGA chip utilizing the SRAM PG as a routing switch.