Contribution of Gate Induced Drain Leakage to Overall Leakage and Yield Loss in Digital submicron VLSI Circuits

In this paper, the impact of gate induced drain leakage (GIDL) on overall leakage of submicron VLSI circuits is studied. GIDL constitutes a serious constraint, with regards to off-state current, in scaled down CMOS devices for DRAM and/or EEPROM applications. Our research shows that the GIDL current is also a serious problem in scaled CMOS digital VLSI circuits. We present the experimental and simulation data of GIDL current as a function of 0.35 μm CMOS technology parameters and layout of CMOS standard cells. The obtained results show that a poorly designed standard cell library for VLSI application may result in extremely high leakage current and poor yield.