Assessing Layout Density Benefits of Vertical Channel Devices

Vertical channel devices have been considered as promising candidates for sub-5 nm regime for the reduced area and large driving current. Several styles of layout designs and fabrication details of vertical channel devices have been proposed. However, due to the fast-changing manufacturing constraints for the advanced devices, the most efficient layout structures are still yet to be explored. In this paper, we study the efficiency in terms of cell area of in-bound power vertical channel device layout, which is potentially the most compact vertical layout style. We develop and implement an efficient vertical layout generation framework for in-bound power layout to provide a quick evaluation of cell area given design rules and choices of folding strategies. The results are compared to vertically stacked lateral channel devices and out-bound power vertical channel devices. Both cell-level and chip-level comparisons show that in-bound power layout is more area-efficient than lateral devices and vertical out-bound power layouts.