Reliability Evaluation of Hot Carrier Injection Effects on MOSFET Devices

This study investigates the implications of hot carrier injection on the characteristics of MOSFETs. N-MOSFET can experience a variety of reliability issues such as hot carrier degradation and drain-induced barrier lowering (DIBL) effects. The objective of this study is to identify the degradation, under DC hot carrier stress environments, of NMOS devices for various substrate doping levels and interface fixed charges. The different characteristics such as threshold voltage, ION current, and DIBL are evaluated using ATLAS Silvaco simulator. Furthermore, this research examines the implications of channel doping or substrate doping concentration on performance of the transistor since substrate doping plays a major part in optimizing the parameters of these devices. The results proved that the higher the doping concentration the lower the on current, ION hence the higher the hot carrier effect. It is possible that new device structures, considering substrate doping level, may be optimized to reduce or eliminate hot carrier degradation.