VLSI DESIGN

C-V Characteristics
by
Malathi .L
Assistant Professor (Sr. Gr.) /ECE
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 C-V Characteristics
&
Non Ideal Effects

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C-V Characteristics

 Each terminal of an MOS transistor has capacitance to the other

terminals.
 In general, these capacitances are nonlinear and voltage dependent (C-
V).
 However, they can be approximated as simple capacitors when their
behavior is averaged across the switching voltages of a logic gate.

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Cutoff
When the transistor is OFF (Vgs < Vt), the channel is not inverted and charge
on the gate is matched with opposite charge from the body. This is called Cgb,
the gate-to-body capacitance.

For negative Vgs, the transistor is in accumulation and Cgb = C0.

As Vgs increases but remains below a threshold, a depletion region forms at the
surface.

This effectively moves the bottom plate downward from the oxide, reducing
the capacitance

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Linear
When Vgs > Vt, the channel inverts and again serves as a good conductive
bottom plate.

However, the channel is connected to the source and drain, rather than the
body, so Cgb drops to 0. At low values of Vds, the channel charge is roughly
shared between source and drain,

so Cgs = Cgd = C /2. As Vds increases, the region near the drain becomes less
0

inverted.

so a greater fraction of the capacitance is attributed to the source and a smaller

fraction to the drain.

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Saturation:
At Vds > Vdsat, the transistor saturates and the channel pinches off.

At this point, all the intrinsic capacitance is to the source.

Because of pinchoff, the capacitance in saturation reduces to Cgs =

2/3 C0 for an ideal transistor.

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 Non Ideal I-V Effects

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Non Ideal I-V Effects

Used to predict their impact on circuit behavior and to be

able to anticipate how devices will change in future process
generations.

 Mobility Degradation and Velocity Saturation

 Channel Length Modulation
 Threshold Voltage Effects
 Leakage
 Temperature Dependence

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Non Ideal I-V Effects

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The saturation current increases less than quadratically with increasing Vgs . This is caused
by two effects:

Velocity Saturation
 At high lateral field strengths (Vds /L), carrier velocity ceases to increase linearly with
field strength. This is called velocity saturation and results in lower Ids than expected at
high Vds .
Mobility Degradation
 At high vertical field strengths (Vgs /tox ), the carriers scatter off the oxide interface more
often, slowing their progress.
 This mobility degradation effect also leads to less current than expected at high Vgs.
 The saturation current of the nonideal transistor increases somewhat with Vds .
 This is caused by channel length modulation, in which higher Vds increases the size of
the depletion region around the drain and thus effectively shortens the channel.

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 Channel length modulation
 One of several short-channel effects in MOSFET scaling, channel length modulation (CLM) is a
shortening of the length of the inverted channel region with increase in drain bias for large drain
biases.

 The result of CLM is an increase in current with drain bias and a reduction of output resistance.

 Channel length modulation occurs in all field effect transistors, not just MOSFETs.

 As the drain voltage increases, its control over the current extends further toward the source, so
the uninverted region expands toward the source, shortening the length of the channel region, the
effect called channel-length modulation.

 Because resistance is proportional to length, shortening the channel decreases its resistance,
causing an increase in current with increase in drain bias for a MOSFET operating in saturation.

 The effect is more pronounced the shorter the source-to-drain separation, the deeper the drain
junction, and the thicker the oxide insulator.

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Threshold Voltage

 The threshold voltage indicates the. gate voltage necessary to invert the
channel and is primarily determined by the oxide thickness and channel
doping levels
 However, other fields in the transistor have some effect on the channel,
effectively modifying the threshold voltage.
 Increasing the potential between the source and body raises the threshold
through the body effect.
 Increasing the drain voltage lowers the threshold through drain-induced
barrier lowering.
 Increasing the channel length raises the threshold through the short channel
effect.

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Short Channel Effect
 The threshold voltage typically increases with channel length. This phenomenon is
especially pronounced for small L where the source and drain depletion regions extend
into a significant portion of the channel, and hence is called the short channel
effect or Vt rolloff.
 In some processes, a reverse short channel effect causes Vt to decrease with length.

 There is also a narrow channel effect in which Vt varies with channel width; this effect
tends to be less significant because the minimum width is greater than the minimum
length.

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Subthreshold Conduction
 Several sources of leakage result in current flow in nominally OFF
transistors.
 When Vgs < Vt , the current drops off exponentially rather than abruptly
becoming zero. This is called subthreshold conduction. The current into the
gate Ig is ideally 0.
Gate Leakage Current
 However, as the thickness of gate oxides reduces to only a small number of
atomic layers, electrons tunnel through the gate, causing some gate
leakage current.
 The source and drain diffusions are typically reverse-biased diodes and
also experience junction leakage into the substrate or well.

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Leakage current
The transistor gate is a good insulator. However,
significant tunneling current flows through very
thin gates. This has limited the scaling of gate
oxide and led to new high-k gate dielectrics.

Leakage current causes CMOS gates to consume

power when idle. It also limits the amount of time
that data is retained in dynamic logic, latches, and
memory cells.

In nanometer processes, dynamic logic and latches

require some sort of feedback to prevent data loss
from leakage. Leakage increases at high
temperature.

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Leakage current
Ideally, static CMOS gates draw zero current and dissipate zero power when idle. Real gates
draw some leakage current.

The most important source at this time is subthreshold leakage between source and drain of
a transistor that should be cut off.

The subthreshold current of an OFF transistor decreases by an order of magnitude for every
60–100 mV that Vgs is below Vt . Threshold voltages have been decreasing, so subthreshold
leakage has been increasing dramatically.

Some processes offer multiple choices of Vt : low-Vt devices are used for high performance
in critical circuits, while high -Vt devices are used for low leakage elsewhere.

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Temperature Dependence

 Both mobility and threshold voltage decrease with rising temperature.

 The mobility effect tends to dominate for strongly ON transistors,

resulting in lower Ids at high temperature.

 The threshold effect is most important for OFF transistors, resulting in

higher leakage current at high temperature.

 MOS characteristics degrade with temperature.

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 Thank You!!
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