Samsung's 3nm GAA Process

By Cadence

May 22, 2019

At the recent Samsung Foundry Forum, HK Kang, the EVP of semiconductor R&D, took to the stage. He's in charge of advanced logic, DRAM, 3D NAND, mask. But that day he was just going to talk about Samsung's 3nm gate-all-around (GAA) technology, that they give the name MBCFET to (MBC stands for multi-bridge-channel).

The motivation for creating GAA technology is similar for the motivation for creating FinFET—better control of the channel. Planar transistor (on the left in the above diagram) was the basic transistor architecture since the invention of the MOSFET until about 20nm. At that point, the leakage became unacceptably high. When the transistor was in the off state, the gate only controlled the top part of the channel and current could sneak around the back, or, more professionally, suffered from short-channel effect.

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