Self-Heating in Advanced CMOS Technologies

On advanced technology nodes, increases in power density, non-planar architectures and different material systems can exacerbate local self-heating due to active power dissipation, which can affect device performance and reliability in various ways. This paper presents an overview of the research on self-heating in transistors and discusses modulators, measurement schemes, spatio-temporal sensitivities, and impacts on performance and reliability. As the industry continues to scale dimensions and power densities, the significance of self-heating effects will continue to grow, and a robust frame-work to fully assess it, and deal with its impacts to circuits and IP blocks are essential.