Performance projections for ballistic carbon nanotube FinFET at circuit level

A novel three-dimensional device structure for a carbon nanotube (CNT) fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is proposed and evaluated. We evaluated the potential of the CNT FinFET compared with a Si FinFET at a 22-nm node at the circuit level using three performance metrics including propagation delay, total power dissipation, and energy-delay product (EDP). Compared with a Si FinFET, the CNT FinFET presents obvious advantages in speed and EDP arising from its almost much larger current density but also results in a higher total power dissipation, especially at a low threshold voltage (V_th = 1/3V_dd). A suitable improvement in V_th can effectively contribute to a significant suppression of leakage current and power dissipation, and then an obvious optimization is obtained in the EDP with an acceptable sacrifice in speed. In particular, CNT FinFETs with optimized threshold voltages can provide an EDP advantage of approximately 50 times over Si FinFETs under a low supply voltage (V_dd = 0.4 V), suggesting great potential for CNT FinFET-based integrated circuits.