Design enablement of CFET devices for sub-2nm CMOS nodes

Novel devices that optimize their structure in a three-dimensional fashion and offer significant area gains by reducing standard cell track height are adopted to scale silicon technologies beyond the 5nm node. Such a device is the Complementary FET (CFET), which consists of an n-type channel stacked vertically over a p-type channel. In this paper we review the significant benefits of CFET devices as well as the challenges that arise with their use. More specifically, we focus on the standard cell design challenges as well as the physical implementation ones. We show that to fully exploit the area benefits of the CFET devices, one must carefully select the metal stack used for the physical implementation of a large design.