High-Field Degradation of Poly-Si Gate p-MOS and n-MOS Devices With Nitrided Oxides

In this paper, the authors investigate polysilicon gate MOS capacitors and MOSFET devices with nitrided oxides. These devices are known to also show a strong negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) effect. The authors analyze the dependence of oxide-trap generation in p-channel and n-channel devices on negative and positive Fowler-Nordheim (FN) charge injection stress by application of various C-V and charge pumping (CP) measurement methods yielding information on traps at different oxide locations. In the case of p-channel devices, a strong evidence for a preexistent very high oxide-trap concentration near the gate already before stress application is obtained. This feature is accompanied by a fast degradation of the p-channel devices under a negative bias stress similar to NBTI degradation. The CP measurements, which, in contrast to classical methods, are able to distinguish between actually fast interface traps and the slower near-interface oxide traps (NIOTs), showed that in all devices, a stress polarity dependence of trap generation occurs only for NIOTs and not for interface traps