Gate oxide characterization with ballistic electron emission microscopy

Ballistic Electron Emission Microscopy (BEEM) is shown to be a versatile new tool for the study of hot electron phenomena in metal-oxide-semiconductor structures. The elusive problem of measuring oxide charge distributions is largely overcome by suitable modeling of the field dependent threshold shifts for both preexisting defects and stress induced traps. Local oxide breakdowns were seldom observed, and then only after injecting charge dosages that exceeded by several orders of magnitude the best values reported on macroscopic samples.