The effects of vacuum spacer transistors between high performance and low stand-by power devices beyond 16nm

The vacuum spacer transistors are compared with the conventional oxide spacer transistors in both high performance device and low standby power device. In high performance device case, with 14nm vacuum spacers, the CMOS inverter delay, switching charge, and switching energy are reduced by 6.6%, 15.6%, and 19.1%, respectively, compared to oxide spacer. In low standby power device case, with 18nm vacuum spacers, the inverter delay is increased by 10% compared to oxide spacer due to the degradation of on-current.