10th Anniversary on the Discovery of Third Breakdown: Implications and Applications

In the history of MOSFET. the quality of its gate dielectric has been a cornerstone of the present semiconductor integrated circuits. The change of gate dielectrics from conventional $\text{SiO}_2$ gate oxide into high-k materials has brought us more challanges. especially more reauirements on reliability when MOSFET dimension is continually scaled. There are two major well known breakdowns in CMOS transistors. Not until 2014, a world first observation of the third breakdown, different from soft- and hard-breakdown, named dielectric fuse breakdown, dFuse, was discovered in the high-k metal-gate generation CMOS. As a result, this talk will elaborate more on future applications in HKMG generations.