As the linear dimensions of a Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) are reduced to the sub-0.1μm range the Negative (Positive) Bias Temperature Instability (N(P)BTI), Hot-Carrier (HC) injection and the Time-dependent Dielectric Breakdown (TDDB) became very crucial reliability concerns. Due to the drastic increase of the electric field in the channel of modern MOSFETs, carriers are being heated and thus gain sufficient energy to produce damage within an insulator film. The understanding and modeling of hot-carrier degradation is one of the most crucial issues in the field of the reliability of a field effect transistors. The essential peculiarities of HC stressing is strong localization of the damage and that the degradation becomes less pronounced at accelerated temperatures (opposite to N(P)BTI). Furthermore, the transformation
of the output transistor characteristics during the stress is strongly dependent on the special location of the degradation portion and this position, in turn, is determined by the device architecture. From a microscopic point of view, N(P)BTI and HCI are closely linked, however it has been repeatedly reported in literature that HC-induced degradation has a larger permanent component. This circumstance reflects that another additional (with respect to N(P)BTI) mechanism in contributing to the HC-related damage. One may conditionally separate the hot carrier reliability modeling into two main blocks. The first one is related to the energetics of the Si-O, Si-H, and Si-Si bond-breakage while the second one is devoted to the calculation of the non-equilibrium distribution function of the carriers in the channel.
Due to the great impact that heated particles have on the degradation process alone, one should carefully model high-energetical tails of the energy distribution. In this connection the full-band device Monte-Carlo method is very well suited. Such an approach allows us not only to model the distribution function but also calculate such relevant parameters as the carrier dynamic temperature, velocity, electrical field distribution, etc. for real (i.e. industrial) MOSFETs.
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