Very high performance 40nm CMOS with ultra-thin nitride/oxynitride stack gate dielectric and pre-doped dual poly-Si gate electrodes

In this work, we report very high performance CMOS devices with 40nm physical gate length, 12A (EOT) nitride/oxynitride (N/O) stack gate dielectrics, and dual pre-doped poly-Si gate electrodes. The strong boron penetration resistance of the high quality NIO stack gate dielectric allows pre-doped poly gates not only for NMOS, but also for PMOS, to minimize poly depletion and improve performance. At room temperature and power supply Vdd of 1.5V, drive currents of 1.12mA/um for NMOS and 545uA/um for PMOS are achieved at off-state leakage Idoff of both devices on the order of 20nA/um. At low temperature of -50C and proper forward body biases, those devices showed drive currents of 1.4mA/um (@ 20nA/um Idoff) for NMOS and 620uA/um (@ 20nA/um Idoff) for PMOS. These represent the highest 40nm CMOS performance figures reported to date.