Hot carrier degradation in novel strained-Si nMOSFETs

High I/sub d-sat/ enhancement is benefited from novel strained-Si process. However, it might cause reliability problems. Here we revealed the HCI degradation of strained-Si devices, which also can be correlated to I/sub b//I/sub d/, were worse than conventional bulk Si devices. Besides, it had high positive temperature coefficient in low voltages. Thus, it would be even worse at the operation voltage.