Investigation of the hot-carrier degradation in Si/SiGe HBT's by intrinsic low frequency noise source modeling

The characterization of the excess low-frequency noise (LFN) properties of electronic devices is a useful tool in the field of reliability physics, because LFN is related to the interactions between charge carriers and material imperfections and defects. The LFN behavior of a bipolar transistor can be described in terms of extrinsic or intrinsic noise sources. The noise representation based on intrinsic noise sources allows more insight, because each source is associated with a particular transistor region. The availability of an intrinsic noise source model therefore allows to locate the degradation occurring during a life test.