Impact of halo doping on the subthreshold performance of deep-submicrometer CMOS devices and circuits for ultralow power analog/mixed-signal applications

Abstract

In addition to its attractiveness for ultralow power applications, analog CMOS circuits based on the subthreshold operation of the devices are known to have significantly higher gain as compared to their superthreshold counterpart. The effects of halo [both double-halo (DH) and single-halo or lateral asymmetric channel (LAC)] doping on the subthreshold analog performance of 100-nm CMOS devices are systematically investigated for the first time with extensive process and device simulations. In the subthreshold region, although the halo doping is found to improve the device performance parameters for analog applications (such as g_m/I_d, output resistance and intrinsic gain) in general, the improvement is significant in the LAC devices. Low angle of tilt of the halo implant is found to give the best improvement in both the LAC and DH devices. Our results show that the CMOS amplifiers made with the halo implanted devices have higher voltage gain over their conventional counterpart, and a more than 100% improvement in the voltage gain is observed when LAC doping is made on both the p- and n-channel devices of the amplifier.