Operational Transconductance Amplifier Designed with Experimental Omega-Gate Nanowire SOI MOSFETs
Authors: de Araujo Gustavo Vinicius , Martino Joao , Agopian Paula 
Published: September 2023

The nanowire omega-gate technology is one of the possible technologies to replace the FinFET one in the semiconductor chip market. The omega-gate nanowire SOI MOSFET is considered a triple plus gate device, near the gate-all-around performance (figure 1) [1]. Due to the omega gate structure this device presents a better gate to channel electrostatic coupling than the FinFET devices, resulting in a greater immunity to short channel effects [1,2].

The Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) is a frequently used analog block in the integrated circuits. The studied OTA consists in a two-stage amplifier, where the first stage is a differential amplifier with active load and the second one is a common source amplifier, as can be seen in figure 2. This analog block is biased through the current source and the bias current is mirrored for each stage. In addition, negative feedback is used between the first and second stages with a compensation capacitor (miller capacitor) in order to stabilize the amplifier response.

In this work, an OTA circuit is designed with SOI omega-gate nanowire experimental transistors. In order to find the best device to be used in the project, some measurements were carried out of several nanowire devices with different channel lengths (ranging from 20 nm to 200 nm). The schematic structure of the measured devices is presented in figure 3 [2]. Basic device parameters such as: transconductance (gm), output conductance (gd), Early voltage (VEA), threshold voltage (VT), transistor efficiency (gm/ID) and subthreshold slope (SS) were analyzed.

The model of the experimental omega-gate transistors was performed using the Look Up Table (LUT) method. The capacitance measurements of the nanowire transistor were also considered, to simulate the frequency responses more faithfully. The simulator used to design the OTA circuit was Cadence using the Verilog-A language. It was obtained the main figure of merit of this block like voltage gain (Av), gain-bandwidth product (GBW), phase margin and power.

A transistor efficiency (gm/ID) near 8 V-1 was chosen in order to compare the performance of OTA designed with omega-gate nanowire devices (NW-OTA) of this work with anothers OTAs designed with triple gate FinFETs (FinFET-OTA) and with nanosheets (NS-OTA) from the literature (Table 1) [3,4].

Table 1 shows that the phase margin is close to 60o in all cases, ensuring the stability of the circuit. The NW-OTA presents higher voltage gain compared to FinFET-OTA due to the better gate to channel coupling. The NS-OTA presents the highest voltage gain of all cases, but it is the more expensive technology [4]. When GBW is analyzed for all 3 designs, the NW-OTA shows better results than the NS-OTA, using the same load capacitance of 200fF, thanks to the lower miller capacitance (Cc) required to keep the frequency behavior. The FinFET-OTA shows the best result in relation to GBW, but the FinFET-OTA project doesn’t consider a load capacitance, making the comparison unfair [3].

Figure 4 shows the gain and phase of the OTA using a SOI omega-gate nanowire transistors.

In summary, the OTA designed with SOI omega-gate nanowire technology presents a better performance than FinFET one, can be implemented in a smaller area on the chip (smaller Cc capacitor and smaller number of fins in parallel) and it is a cheaper option compared to nanosheet one.

Figure 1