Effects of Plasma Damage on Metal-Insulator-Metal Capacitors and Transistors for Advanced Mixed-Signal/Radio-Frequency Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor Technology

摘要

The effects of damage on mixed-signal (MS)/radio-frequency (RF) circuits integrated with metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors and advanced metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are studied in this work. The impact of damage on an MIM oxide is evaluated by connecting its capacitor top metal (CTM) to an upper-level metal with a large antenna ratio (AR_(CTM)) used in an actual CTM circuit connected to an interconnect. In addition to the dielectric degradation of a transistor, we also investigate the damage-enhanced negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) degradation of a transistor with its gate electrode connected to an MIM capacitor with a large ARctm for various gate oxide thicknesses. A model is proposed to explain the experimentally observed dependence of NBTI degradation on AR_(CTM) and accurately simulate failure distributions in the presence of plasma damage.