Method of reducing current leakage in a product variant of a semiconductor device

摘要

A method of reducing current leakage in product variants of a semiconductor device, during the fabrication of the semiconductor device. The method involves using a semiconductor process technique for reducing current leakage in semiconductor product variants having unused circuits. A semiconductor device or integrated circuit fabricated by this method has reduced current leakage upon powering as well as during operation. The method involves semiconductor process technique that substantially increases the Vt (threshold voltage) of all transistors of a given type, such as all N-type transistors or all P-type transistors. The semiconductor process technique is also suitable for controlling other transistor parameters, such as transistor channel length, as well as other active elements, such as N-type resistors or P-type resistors, in unused circuits which affect leakage current as well as for unused circuits having previously applied semiconductor process techniques, such as a high Vt circuit, a standard Vt circuit, a low Vt circuit, and an SRAM cell Vt circuit.

主权项

1. A method of reducing current leakage in a product variant of a semiconductor device, the method comprising:
obtaining a design for fabricating the semiconductor device, the design comprising active circuits and unused circuits; identifying, from the unused circuits in the obtained design, one or more idle circuits, wherein each idle circuit is an unused circuit that is idle and not used in the product variant of the semiconductor device; fabricating the product variant of the semiconductor device based on the obtained design; and during fabrication of the product variant of the semiconductor device:
selectively masking the product variant of the semiconductor device to expose each identified idle circuit; andmodifying a characteristic of each exposed identified idle circuit to inhibit each exposed identified idle circuit and to reduce current leakage therefrom.