Can macroscopic oxide thickness uniformity improve oxide reliability?

In this work, we investigated both experimentally and numerically the impact of macroscopic oxide thickness uniformity on Weibull breakdown characteristics for both Weibull parameters, namely, the characteristics times (T/sub 63/) and Weibull slopes (/spl beta/) over a wide range of oxide thickness. A detailed full-scale Monte Carlo analysis is used to examine the breakdown characteristics at low-percentile and its sensitivity to variation of thickness dependence of time-to-breakdown and Weibull slopes. We show that for thinner oxides with very shallow Weibull slopes the impact of thickness variation is drastically reduced as compared to thicker oxides for the same parameters.