Narendra Parihar, Uma Sharma, et al.
IRPS 2019
Hard breakdown (HBD) is shown to be a gradual process with the gate current increasing at a predictable rate exponentially dependent on the instantaneous stress voltage and oxide thickness. This is contrary to conventional wisdom that maintains that HBD is a fast thermally driven process. The HBD degradation rate (DR) for a 15 Å oxide scales from > 1 mA/s at 4 V to < 1 nA/s at 2 V, extrapolating to < 10 fA/s at use voltage. Adding the HBD evolution time to the standard time-to-breakdown potentially reduces the projected fail rate of gate dielectrics by orders of magnitude.
Narendra Parihar, Uma Sharma, et al.
IRPS 2019
Emily Ray, Barry P. Linder, et al.
IRPS 2015
James H. Stathis, Souvik Mahapatra, et al.
Microelectronics Reliability
Peter E. Blöchl, James H. Stathis
Physical Review Letters