Will Self-heating be Seriously Problematic in Sub-10nm Technology Nodes?

Continuous scaling of the transistor improves its performance and, however, also introduces some new problems, especially the increasingly severer self-heating effect (SHE). In this paper, the transient SHE behaviors in transistors of the advanced technology nodes are discussed. By utilizing the ultra-fast (sub-1ns) measurement technique, I-V characteristics of FinFETs at different switch speeds could be obtained and the real-time channel temperature change is able to be experimentally observed. It has been confirmed that several seconds are required to heat up the channel of transistors. Therefore, in sub-10 nm devices, SHE may be alleviated under high frequency/speed operations and the simulation results also show the similar phenomena and trend.