Assessment of Single-Particle Displacement Damage in 14-nm and 5-nm FinFET SRAMs

Ionizing and non-ionizing particles in the environment can interact with semiconductor materials and create defects in the lattice, known as displacement damage (DD). As technology nodes scale down in size to improve performance, transistor geometries also become comparable in size to DD defect clusters, which may lead to severe degradation in transistor operation and circuit-level reliability. This work investigated the DD vulnerability of SRAM designs at 14- and 5-nm bulk FinFET semiconductor fabrication processes. Single-particle DD effects were observed for the first time in 1-fin SRAM designs at the 14-nm node as stuck SRAM bits. Cumulative-particle DD effects were observed in all SRAM designs at the 14- and 5-nm bulk FinFET nodes. Monte-Carlo statistical modeling using molecular simulations was conducted to understand the amount of DD damage necessary to cause operational failure.