FinFET reliability study by forward gated-diode method

Reliability of FinFETs is studied in this paper using the forward gated-diode generation-recombination (G-R) current. It is observed that the stress induced interface states result in the shift of the peak G-R current (ΔI_peak) in the body current (I_b) versus gate voltage (V_g) characteristic, therefore the variation of interface states with stress time was calculated. In the Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) stress condition, the evident difference of the output current degradation was achieved by interchanging the source and drain of FinFET. This phenomenon indicated the asymmetric distribution of the interface states along the channel, and the deduction was demonstrated by extracting the distribution of the interface states subsequently. Moreover, the generation of the interface states induce by HCI was estimated from the output characteristic.