Statistics of successive breakdown events for ultra-thin gate oxides

The first oxide breakdown event does not always cause the device or chip failure. In this work, a simple analytical physics-based model is proposed to describe the statistics of successive breakdown events in gate insulators. The results are tested using grouping experiments based on very large sample size statistics. These results are relevant to the reliability of circuit applications where the device (and/or the chip) tolerates several breakdown events without causing device/circuit malfunction. Approximate Weibull distributions valid at the low percentiles relevant to reliability extrapolation are also presented.