Silicon Carbide (SiC) Nanoelectromechanical Antifuse for Ultralow-Power One-Time-Programmable (OTP) FPGA Interconnects

oleh: Tina He, Fengchao Zhang, Swarup Bhunia, Philip X.-L. Feng

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: IEEE 2015-01-01

Deskripsi

We report a new nanoscale antifuse featuring low-power and high-programming speed, by employing silicon carbide (SiC) nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). We show that the SiC NEMS antifuses can enable ultralow-power one-time-programmable (OTP) field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with characteristics promising for security-sensitive and harsh-environment applications. The SiC NEMS antifuses offer minimal leakage, low-programming voltage (down to ~1.5 V), ideally abrupt transient, high on/off ratios (&gt;10<sup>7</sup>) and high-current carrying ability (&gt;10<sup>6</sup> A/cm<sup>2</sup>), and very small footprints (~1 &#x03BC;m<sup>2</sup> to ~0.1 &#x03BC;m<sup>2</sup> per device). We further describe new designs of antifuses, simulate FPGA benchmarking circuits based on experimentally demonstrated practical NEMS antifuses, and compare their advantageous performance with state-of-the-art conventional antifuse FPGAs. We also demonstrate a SiC NEMS antifuse-based OTP memory cell with a read margin of &gt;10<sup>6</sup>.