A CMOS/SOS Reliability Study

With over 100,000 hours of reliability testing of complementary metal oxide semiconductor devices built on sapphire substrates, a pattern of failure mechanisms has emerged. Not surprisingly, the well known gate oxide charge instabilities and gate oxide shorts commonly found in CMOS are also present in this latest technology innovation. The sapphire technology has added to these failure mechanisms several problems related to the input protective network and the so called back-channel leakage current stemming from the silicon-sapphire interface.