Chip Variability Mitigation through Continuous Diffusion Enabled by EUV and Self-Aligned Gate Contact

The diffusion break (DB) induced layout effect is one of the major culprits for device variability and deteriorators for chip Vmin and Iddq. For the first time, the performance and leakage impacts from varied types of diffusion breaks are quantified at the device and chip critical path levels. The continuous diffusion with gate tie-down stands out as the best choice due to the superior N/P balance and lower variability caused by the layout effect. To implement the continuous diffusion at the advanced FinFET technology node, careful physical design at cell boundary is crucial, which is enabled by EUV to solve the contact via color conflict and by self-aligned gate contact (SAGC) to mitigate the gate to diffusion leakage risk.