An accurate hot carrier reliability monitor for deep-submicron shallow S/D junction thin gate oxide n-MOSFETs

In this paper, an accurate criterion has been proposed for reliability evaluation of state-of-the-art deep-submicron S/D extension n-MOSFETs. A new monitor for hot carrier reliability evaluation has been developed using total values of the number of interface states N/sub it/ in the effective channel length region, instead of commonly used substrate current (I/sub B/), impact ionization rate (I/sub D//I/sub B/), or peak/average N/sub it/ values. An accurate degradation model has thus been developed based on the N/sub it/ distribution and mobility scattering effect. Moreover, this approach has been successfully used to demonstrate the feasibility for gate-engineering studies.