Tech Tour of Metal Gate I/O Transistors
Kevin Gibb, Product Line Manager, TechInsights
EETimes (1/11/2016 00:01 AM EST)
No one talks about the workhorse of the metal gate CMOS transistors -- the input/output (I/O) transistor. TechInsights thinks they are worth a look.
Much has been written about metal gate CMOS transistors for low-voltage applications such as processors and system on chip (SoC) devices. But these devices are connected to the outside world and require input/output (I/O) transistors that support higher bias voltages. Little is said about input/output (I/O) transistors. We at TechInsights think that they are worth a look.
We begin with a polysilicon gate I/O transistor, in this case from a 28nm node MediaTek part fabbed by TSMC (Figure 1). The I/O transistor has a fairly long gate length (160nm) that is typical of I/O transistors. This long gate length reduces the magnitude of the lateral electric field in the channel region beneath the gate. We care about this lateral field as it gives rise to hot carrier injection of electrons (NMOS) or holes (PMOS) from the channel into the gate dielectric that can degrade the transistor’s electrical performance.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Temperature Glitch Detector
- Clock Attack Monitor
- SoC Security Platform / Hardware Root of Trust
- SPI to AHB-Lite Bridge
- Octal SPI Master/Slave Controller
Related News
- TSMC Adds High-K Metal Gate Low Power Process to 28nm Road Map
- ARM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES Establish a Strategic Partnership to Enable Application Optimized SoC Products on 28nm High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) Process
- Samsung Electronics Qualifies Foundry Industry's First 32nm Low Power High-K Metal Gate Logic Process and Design Ecosystem
- GLOBALFOUNDRIES Launches Industry's First 28nm ARM Cortex-A9 Processor Platform with Gate First High-K Metal Gate
Latest News
- RaiderChip NPU for LLM at the Edge supports DeepSeek-R1 reasoning models
- The world’s first open source security chip hits production with Google
- ZeroPoint Technologies Unveils Groundbreaking Compression Solution to Increase Foundational Model Addressable Memory by 50%
- Breker RISC-V SystemVIP Deployed across 15 Commercial RISC-V Projects for Advanced Core and SoC Verification
- AheadComputing Raises $21.5M Seed Round and Introduces Breakthrough Microprocessor Architecture Designed for Next Era of General-Purpose Computing