Voltage acceleration of oxide breakdown in the sub-10 nm Fowler-Nordheim and direct tunneling regime

The TDDB-power-law model was shown to describe the experimental data for nFET and pFET devices in the direct tunneling regime very well. In this work it is investigated whether it can be extended into the voltage range, where elastic Fowler-Nordheim tunneling dominates. Both nFET and pFET devices are investigated and were found to behave different. For nFET a universal power-law expression is proposed for the entire sub-10 nm range.