Process-induced damage in a dual-oxide (3.5/6.8 nm) 0.18-/spl mu/m copper CMOS technology

Charging behaviour for three antenna types (polysilicon, contact array, and via array) is investigated for two oxide thicknesses in a copper back-end-of-line (BEOL) technology. We find that both the thick (6.8 nm) and the thin oxide (3.5 nm) devices are similarly susceptible to charging damage for various processes, except that damage manifests itself as gate leakage on the thin oxide devices, while the thick oxide device shows degradation to hot electron immunity as well as gate leakage.