Hot carrier aging of nano-meter devices

As the device size downscales, hot carrier aging (HCA) scales up and remerges as a major challenge to the reliability of modern CMOS technologies. The conventional method for predicting the HCA device lifetime is based on a power law kinetics and critically depends on the accuracy of the time power exponent, n. In this work, we study how to extract the n accurately. It will be shown that the widely used forward saturation current degradation gives erroneous n, because of the channel pinch-off. To reduce the test time, it will be demonstrated that the voltage step stress technique is applicable to HCA. The accuracy of the extracted HCA model will be verified against independently measured test data.