Gate oxide reliability: upcoming trends, challenges, and opportunities

Any product that stops functioning before its declared useful lifetime will be deemed substandard at best, dangerous or fatal at worst. Integrated circuits (ICs) are typically a part of a larger product, which, depending on the target market, may be expected to operate reliably for up to multiple decades, often in extreme environments, and in mission-critical applications. It is therefore essential that reliability is engineered into the ICs and their individual components already during their development, and not ignored altogether, or merely evaluated as an afterthought.