On the Scaling of Temperature-Dependent Effects

With ever increasing power density and temperature variations within chips, it is very important to correctly model temperature effects on the devices in a compact way and to predict their scaling. In this paper, it is first shown that the temperature dependences of the mobility and the saturation velocity need to be treated separately in modeling the current with the temperature effects. A new compact temperature- dependent model for the ON-current is presented based on the alpha-power law and is verified with BSIM3. Then, the scaling of the ON-current temperature dependence is discussed. It is also shown in this paper that the temperature effects will have an increasing impact on repeater-insertion methodology. Furthermore, the temperature-dependence scaling of the leakage current is analyzed. It is shown that its temperature dependence decreases with technology scaling, but temperature-aware power- reduction techniques will actually save larger fraction of the total power due to the increasing dominance of leakage power.