Effect of Nitride Sidewall Spacer on Hot Carrier Reliability Characteristics of MOSFET's

In this paper, we have compared the reliability characteristics of MOSFET with nitride sidewall and oxide sidewall spacer. We found that the unique reliability characteristics of nitride sidewall spacer device. At the initial stage of stress, large degradation of drain current occurs for nitride sidewall device at low stress drain bias due to the enhanced trapping of nitride spacer. However, nitride sidewall devices exhibit improvement of device lifetime which was defined as a 10% degradation of drain current.