Thermal-Aware IC Chip Design by Combining High Thermal Conductivity Materials and GAA MOSFET

Abstract

The high integration of integrated circuit (IC) chip design has made thermal-aware design as one of the first priorities of the modern IC chip industry. Even though the modern IC chip technologies have aimed to achieve thermal stability by optimizing circuit design, the rapidly growing integration requires thermal-aware design not only in circuit level but also in transistor level. Such thermal-aware design with bottom-up (from the transistor level to the packaging level) can be used to reliable IC chips. Moreover, since aluminum oxide (Al2O3, also known as alumina) is compatible with CMOS fabrication process and has excellent thermal conductivity, it is possible to efficiently accomplish the improved thermal-aware design. Specifically, Al2O3 has 59 times thermal conductivity compared to HfO2, and 19 times thermal conductivity compared to SiO2. In this paper, considering the outstanding thermal characteristics of Al2O3, we propose a comprehensive improvement including thermal characteristics by combining Al2O3 and GAA MOSFET. As a result, the maximum lattice temperature (T-max) in transistor has been significantly improved from 624 K to 518 K. In addition, capacitance of transistor could be also decreased, which will give benefits to inverter delay and three-stage ring oscillator (RO3) delay in IC chip.