Photon emission in deep submicron SOI MOSFETs

Hot carrier effects are thoroughly investigated in deep submiron N-and P-channel SOI MOSFETs using photon emission measurements. A substantial enhancement of the emitted photon number is observed with increasing the drain bias in the low gate voltage range, showing the impact of the parasitic bipolar transistor action (PBT). For Vg close to zero, a significant increase of the photon emission is also obtained with reducing the gate length down to sub-0.1 μm for both N- and P-channel transistors. The maximal photon number is obtained for the lower gate bias in the case of a sufficiently high drain voltage and/or small gate length. For low Vd and/or long channels, N
_ph
is maximum around Vg≈Vd/2. These results are in agreement with those obtained in hot-carrier-induced degradations, showing the strong correlation between the emitted photon number and the reliability of the SOI devices in the studied range of gate and drain biases, and highlighting the influence of the PBT action.