A Unified Compact Model of the Gate Oxide Reliability for Complete Circuit Level Analysis

A unified compact model to predict the performance degradation of a circuit due to the electrical gate oxide stress is developed and verified by experimental results. Hot carrier injection (HCI), off-state (OS), and Fowler-Nordheim (FN) degradations can be described by a single formula which models the trap generation over the stress time and voltage. With the proposed model, the propagation delay (tPD) degradation of a ring oscillator is reproduced with the accuracy of more than 90%. It is found that OS plays major role in the tPD degradation rather than HCI, while the component ratio of HCI is getting larger as the frequency increases.