TECHNICAL SEMINAR

Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering

ABHIJIT.M
1BY13EC004
Under the guidance of
Dr. Seema Singh
 The need for self healing transistors
 Devices for a starchip
 Evolution of MOS devices
 Healing process
 Self healing applied to memory cells
 Further research
 References

2
 Breakthrough Starshot, is a program to develop a
proof-of-concept light sail spacecraft fleet
capable of making the journey to Alpha
Centauri at 20% the speed of light.

3
•The spacecraft fleet would have 1000 craft, and each
craft, named StarChip, would be a very small
centimetre-sized craft weighing several grams.

•They would be propelled by several ground-

based lasers of up to 100 gigawatts.

4
 Twenty years in space is still too long for an
ordinary silicon chip, because on its journey it
will be bombarded by more high-energy
radiation than chips encounter on Earth.

 Radiation leads to the accumulation of

positively charged defects in the chip’s silicon
dioxide layer, where they degrade device
performance.

5
 Two options for addressing chip damage are
to select a path through space that minimizes
radiation exposure and to add shielding.

 A far better approach, is to let the devices

suffer damage but to design them so that
they can heal themselves with heat.

6
 Among various device structures, the sillicon
nanowire gate all around FET (SiNW GAA FET)
has been considered as a promising
candidate for a starchip due to its inherent
radiation hardness.

7
The evolution from
basic planar FETs to
SiNW GAA FET

8
 A basic MOSFET

9
 In a planar FET, as the channel length
reduces, the control of the gate over the
channel region also reduces. This affects
transistor performance.

 In a FinFET, the gate wraps around a thin

slice of (preferably undoped) silicon, also
known as a “fin”, and current flows along
the top and side surfaces of the fin.

10
 This wrap-around nature of the gate
enhances the gate control over the channel,
thus reducing the short channel effects and
leakage currents.

11
 In these nanodevices, current flows through
the nanowire or is pinched off under the control of
the voltage on the gate electrode, which surrounds
the nanowire. Hence, nanowire FETs’ other name:
“gate-all-around” transistors.

12
 Gate-all-around transistors have been
constructed from dense stacks of 8-
nanometerwide nanowires on a conventional
silicon surface.

13
14
Joule heating (also referred to as resistive or
ohmic heating) describes the process where the
energy of an electric current is converted into heat
as it flows through a resistance.

15
 When Si is thermally
oxidized, the interface
between Si and oxide is
deficient of oxygen giving
rise to “dangling bonds”.

 These dangling bonds act

as interface traps.

16
 Interface traps are also generated when MOS
samples are exposed to ionizing radiation.

 These interface traps trap electrons in the gate

dielectric, leading to tunneling of electrons
through gate oxide.

 Interface traps lead to low quality oxides and

degradation in the device performance.

17
 The damaged oxide changes the I-V
characteristics of the device, reducing current in
nMOS transistors and increasing current in pMOS
transistors.

 To remove these interface traps, oxide layer

annealing is done.

18
 Annealing is heating the wafer at high
temperature for a specific time to repair
lattice damage.

 When the oxide is exposed to high

temperatures, the bonds broken by ionizing
radiation are formed again. Thus, the
damages caused by ionizing radiation are
fixed.

19
Self healing
The self healing process can be
understood as the thermal annealing of
oxide layer by the gate as a nano heater.

20
 To demonstrate self
healing, the fabricated
devices consisted of
dual gate contacts. One
for normal operation
and other to generate
joule heat during
annealing.

21
 The temperature of the gate can surpass
900°C within 10ns, which is sufficient to
remove the interface traps and trapped
charges in the gate dielectric.

22
 Electrically programmable memories
These devices work by storing charge on a floating
gate. Programming and erasing is done by electron
conduction through thin SiO2 .

23
 Flash memory uses Fowler-Nordheim(FN)
tunneling for a program and erase
operations.

 The tunnel oxide is inevitably susceptible

against FN mechanism.

 However, the device mechanism can be

maintained by application of the self healing
process.

24
 Today, efforts at NASA and KAIST are focusing
on the elimination of the second gate contact
for heating.

 Those at KAIST are investigating the capability

of a different design, called a junctionless
nanowire transistor, which heats the channel
during normal operation.

25
 “Sustainable Electronics for Nano-Spacecraft in Deep Space Missions”
D.-I. Moon1, J.-Y. Park2, J.-W. Han1, G.-J. Jeon2, J.-Y. Kim2, J.-B. Moon2, M.-L.
Seol1,C. K. Kim2, H. C. Lee2, M. Meyyappan1, and Y.-K. Choi2.

 “Self-Healing Transistors for Chip-Scale Starships” IEEE spectrum.

 J. C. King and C. Hu, IEEE Electron Device Lett., vol. 15, p. 475, 1994

 “Ionizing Radiation Effects in MOS Devices and Circuits” by T. P. Ma, Paul V.

Dressendorfer.

 “Lecture - 14 Oxidation IV – Oxide Charges and Oxidation Systems” Dr. Nandita

Dasgupta Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology,
Madras.

 “Modeling and Simulation of Negative Bias Temperature Instability” Robert

Entner.

26