A new equivalent circuit design for a multi-gate MOSFET device: investigation of electrical behavior and application in current mirror

Despite the interesting electrical properties of the multi-gate (MG) MOSFET device, its integration into integrated circuits (ICs), whether analog or digital, represents a significant challenge for its manufacturing development. In this paper, a new equivalent circuit has been proposed to study the electrical behavior of the MG-MOSFET transistor and facilitate its integration into ICs. The design of this proposed equivalent circuit is based on the parallel connection approach of single-gate (SG) transistors depending on the number of gates of the MG-MOSFET device. In order to investigate the electrical performance of the proposed equivalent circuit, a numerical study of the output (I_D-V_DS) and transfer (I_D-V_GS) characteristics, threshold voltage (V_th), saturation current (I_ON), leakage current (I_OFF), on-resistance (R_ON), subthreshold slope (SS), transconductance (g_m), and transition frequency (f_T) of this device as a function of the number of its gates (n), which represents the number of SG-MOSFETs in Silicon technology, designed at the 130 nm node, and integrated in the proposed equivalent circuit, was performed. The obtained results showed that this proposed equivalent circuit studies with high efficiency the electrical performance of the MG-MOSFET device and represents a very good alternative to it in integrated circuits. In addition, the operability of this proposed equivalent circuit in analogue applications has been verified through integrating it into a simple current mirror, which proved high performance in terms of low current transfer error and high output resistance value, as well as low voltage and low power.