METS: a metric for electro-thermal sensitivity, and its application to FinFETs

While device dimensions continue to shrink into the sub-90nm range, device self-heating emerges as a pressing problem, affecting both mobility and leakage current. Coupled electro-thermal simulation can be used to assess the impact. Simulation, however, is time consuming. Furthermore, it does not give insight into the device´s performance robustness against self-heating. We propose in this paper a novel metric, metric for electro-thermal sensitivity (METS), for characterizing a device´s electrical robustness to self-heating. We demonstrate the effectiveness of METS in characterizing FinFETs, novel double-gate devices promising to replace traditional MOSFETs because of their reduced leakage currents. FinFETs are an ideal case study for METS as they have ultra thin bodies and are thus prone to self-heating. We show that our proposed metric, METS, is capable of characterizing the self-heating behavior of FinFETs in the on and off states