Design and Characterization of the Next Generation Nanowire Amplifiers

Vertical nanowire surrounding gate field effect transistors (SGFETs) provide full gate control over the channel to eliminate short-channel effects. This paper presents design and characterization of a differential pair amplifier using NMOS and PMOS SGFETs with a 10 nm channel length and a 2 nm channel radius. The amplifier dissipates 5 μW power and provides 5 THz bandwidth with a voltage gain of 16, a linear output voltage swing of 0.5 V, and a distortion better than 3% from a 1.8 V power supply and a 20 aF capacitive load. The 2nd- and 3rd-order harmonic distortions of the amplifier are −40 dBm and −52 dBm, respectively, and the 3rd-order intermodulation is −24 dBm for a two-tone input signal with 10 mV amplitude and 10 GHz frequency spacing. All these parameters indicate that vertical nanowire surrounding gate transistors are promising candidates for the next generation high-speed analog and VLSI technologies