Abstract
The work addresses benefits and performance impacts resulted from CMOS gate height reduction. The experiment shows that capacitance arising between the CMOS source/drain contact and the gate electrode decreases about linearly as the gate height scales down. The result also shows that stress liner techniques continue providing strong performance enhancement for CMOS as the gate height scales from lOOnm to 50nm. For ring oscillators built with 45nm node CMOS technology, the capacitance benefit associated with gate height reduction from lOOnm to 80nm improves the circuit speed by ∼3%. © 2008 IEEE.