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2006 Conference Best Paper Awards
Best Invited Paper
The Best Invited Paper Award of CICC 2006 went to the
paper titled “Implications of Proximity Effects for Analog Design” by Drennan, Kniffin, and
Locascio from Freescale
Semiconductor. This paper
has demonstrated the significant impact of well proximity effect (WPE)
and shallow trench isolation (STI) stress on analog design. The well proximity can create a graded
channel MOSFET, leading to S/D asymmetry, which may be overlooked in
thin-gate logic transistors whereas is of paramount importance to
analog designs such as current mirrors.
Likewise, the STI stress is shown to not only modify carrier
mobility in the channel, but also affect the effective channel length
because of dopant redistribution.
To alleviate these effects, the paper has demonstrated layout- level techniques such as increased
active-to-well spacing, S/D orientation aware FET placement for WPE,
and block design with dummy gate insertion for STI stress effect, at
the expense of silicon area and cost.
In addition, proper incorporation of these proximity effects
into the design flow presents considerable technical challenges in
SPICE models, early-stage a priori prediction of proximity effects,
schematic extraction of the S/D orientation etc. As the authors rightfully warn, without
any understanding of these effects, the designer is completely blind to
these potential sources of catastrophic circuit failure.
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