Reliability and characterization for deep sub-micron CMOS devices

Abstract

The DCIV technique was improved and its application extended to devices with direct tunneling oxide (Chapter 2), and the TTT method was developed to monitor source/drain region defect buildup (Chapter 3). the DCIV technique further showed its unique advantage to distinguish interface traps over the channel area or around the drain area. An interesting phenomenon regarding interface trap generation and recombination/migration was reported (Chapter 4). Hot carrier effect was studied for devices with direct tunneling gate oxide (Chapter 5). As interface trap creation dominates the device degradation, the DCIV method was used to investigate the degradation mechanism. A bottleneck for modern MOS devices is NBTI, which may become the scaling a??killera?? in terms of reliability. Fortunately, the finding of DNBTI, to a large extent, will alleviate the concern of this kind of degradation (Chapter 6).