An Unique Methodology to Estimate The Thermal Time Constant and Dynamic Self Heating Impact for Accurate Reliability Evaluation in Advanced FinFET Technologies

The increasing impact of self-heating effect (SHE) in complex FinFET structure is a serious reliability concern. Although the evaluation of SHE has become extremely arduous; this work proposes an in-situ layout based experimental solution to find out the precise thermal time constant (TTH) due to SHE on advanced FinFET devices, even with the application of very pragmatic ‘circuit-like’ gate and drain input waveforms. Using this precise TTH, the accurate dynamic thermal profile is found out from SPICE simulations. Finally, the true degradations due to different reliability mechanisms are evaluated including SHE impact and successfully compared with measured FinFET silicon data.