New Observations on the Correlation Between Hole-Trapping Transformation and SILC Generation Under NBTI Stressing

New observations on the correlation between the recoverable-to-permanent transformation of hole trapping and the generation of stress-induced leakage current (SILC) under negative-bias temperature stressing are presented. Both effects are shown to exhibit very similar temperature dependence, activation energies, and power-law time exponents. In addition, a corner temperature (~125 °C), which marks an increase in the activation energy from the high-to-low temperature regime, is revealed in both the trapped-hole transformation and the SILC generation, further highlighting the strongly correlated behaviors of the two effects. These findings corroborate an earlier hypothesis that both phenomena share a common degradation mechanism.