Operational transconductance amplifier designed with nanowire tunnel-FET with Si, SiGe and Ge sources using experimental data

Abstract

In this paper operational transconductance amplifiers (OTA) were designed with nanowire (NW) tunnel field effect transistors (TFET) with different source materials (Si, SiGe, and Ge) and compared with NW Si MOSFET devices. Lookup tables with experimental data were used to model the transistors and simulate the OTAs. At the same dimensions and transistor efficiency region, the TFET OTAs have larger gain than the MOSFET circuit. The Ge-source TFET OTA presents the highest differential gain (105 dB), followed by the Si TFET (96 dB) and the SiGe-source TFET (90 dB), with the MOSFET presenting the lowest gain (51 dB). However, the MOSFET has the best gain-bandwidth product (GBW) (9.2 MHz) followed by the Ge-source TFET (1.6 MHz), the SiGe-source TFET (900 kHz) and the Si TFET (41 kHz). The second group of OTAs, where the same power consumption was considered and where the gain of the MOSFET OTA and the GBW of the TFETs' circuits were increased was also studied. The gain of the MOSFET OTA increased to 56 dB, but it is still lower than the TFET circuits (96, 90 and 102 dB for the Si TFET, SiGe-source TFET and Ge-source TFET, respectively). The GBW of the Si TFET, SiGe-source TFET and Ge-source TFET circuits increased to 71 kHz, 1 MHz, and 2 MHz, respectively. Nevertheless, the MOSFET OTA has the best GBW (4.7 MHz) again but being just 2.35 times the GBW of the Ge-source TFET case. Therefore, because of the high gain of the TFETs OTAs, they are indicated for low power, low-frequency applications, with the Ge-source TFET presenting a good compromise between gain and GBW. The circuits' linearity was also verified, and they demonstrate to be more dependent on bias choices than on the devices themselves.