Spinnaker Semiconductor will develop a low temperature variant of its proprietary Schottky Barrier CMOS (SBCMOS) technology. Cooled, short channel (<100nm) Schottky Barrier MOS devices offer the possibility for ballistic transport between source and drain and thus are expected to have tremendous performance advantages over their room temperature, conventional CMOS counterparts. These include the virtual elimination of gate oxide surface scattering and the resulting increase in carrier mobility, reduction in noise, and improved long-term reliability and/or switching performance. The SBCMOS technology is also unconditionally immune to parasitic bipolar effects such as latch-up and is orders of magnitude less sensitive to heavy-ion strikes and other single event phenomena. Furthermore, the process sequence is significantly simpler and more manufacturable than that for room temperature, conventional CMOS, while simultaneously offering more compact design rules for circuit layout and total dose hardness to 1Mrad. Finally, Spinnaker Semiconductor's SBCMOS process is an all-silicon technology that uses standard processing steps and is easily integrated into existing silicon fabrication lines, allowing it to achieve similar economies of scale compared to conventional silicon CMOS.
