Impact of Hot-Carrier Stress on Oxide Trap Switching Activity in Nanoscale FETs

摘要

Due to the ongoing reduction in transistor geometries, the significance of individual oxide traps' behavior on the reliability of nanoscale FETs has become more pronounced. However, even though transistor degradation due to interface trap generation by hot-carrier stress (HCS) has been reported in many studies, there is little attention been paid to the impact of HCS on the time-zero oxide traps' switching activity. In this work, the impact of HCS on pre-existing oxide traps in a p-MOSFET is investigated. The results show that HCS can alter the occupancy of switching oxide traps, due to a change in the traps' capture time constant. This effect should be included in the overall reliability assessment of nanoscale FETs.