Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2002. / Restricted until May 2003. Bibliography: leaves 88-91.

In this thesis, we present a high-speed non-classical unipolar CMOS with a thick sidewall-spacer gate-oxide NMOS load. This unipolar CMOS is composed of a NMOS driver and a thick sidewall-spacer gate-oxide NMOS which replaces a PMOS as load. We focus on the investigation of punch-through current in unipolar CMOS trends. In addition, we also design a conventional CMOS for comparison. According to the simulations, the logical characteristics of our proposed CMOS are valid, in which the average propagation delay time is improved 20 % compared with the conventional CMOS. This is due to the presence of a thick sidewall-spacer gate-oxide NMOS load. For the viewpoint of device fabrication, the N well process can also be eliminated. This means that the proposed NMOS load not only improves the CMOS speed, but also reduces the fabrication cost. Thus, because of the shared-terminal output, the layout area can be significantly decreased 41 %, in comparison with the conventional CMOS.