1. Toward Monolithically Integrated Hybrid CMOS-NEM Circuits.
- Author
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Sikder, Urmita, Horace-Herron, Kelsey, Yen, Ting-Ta, Usai, Giulia, Hutin, Louis, Stojanovic, Vladimir, and Liu, Tsu-Jae King
- Subjects
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HYBRID integrated circuits , *STRAY currents , *MANUFACTURING processes , *NANOELECTROMECHANICAL systems , *VOLTAGE , *INTEGRATED circuit interconnections , *ZERO voltage switching - Abstract
Nanoelectromechanical (NEM) switches offer the advantages of zero OFF-state leakage current, abrupt switching characteristics, nonvolatile (NV) operation, and relatively low ON-state resistance as compared with CMOS transistors predominantly used for digital computing today. NEM switches can be implemented using metallic interconnect layers formed in the back-end-of-line (BEOL) steps of a standard CMOS IC manufacturing process, in order to enable compact implementation of hybrid CMOS-NEM circuits. In this article, a release-etch method is developed for realizing BEOL NV-NEM switches with $\leq 100$ -nm contact gaps. A functional array of BEOL NV-NEM switches is used to implement a hybrid CMOS-NEM IC for data search applications. NV-NEM switch design optimization to minimize the programming voltage and accelerate switching speed is discussed. A scaled NV-NEM technology is projected to be advantageous for high-speed, low-power reconfigurable computing applications. This projection is validated with experimental data for a BEOL NV-NEM switch implemented with a conventional 16-nm CMOS IC manufacturing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
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