Impact of NBTI on Increasing the Susceptibility of FinFET to Radiation

This work investigates the interaction between Neg-ative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI)and radiation effects in 14nm FinFET devices. Due to the complex interaction between traps generated by NBTI and induced charges by strikes of ionizing particles, we opted for a complete physical-based analysis using TCAD mixed-mode simulations. This enables an accurate estimation and then modeling of the duration a circuit requires to recover from a particle strike and, thus, return to correct operation under the effects of NBTI. This a crucial aspect, because the longer the recovery time, the higher the probabilities of a soft-error and that this error remains undetected. Further, our employed setup enables an accurate determination of the critical charge (Q
_crit
), i. e. the minimum collected charge that results into a faulty transition of a circuit's output node. Our investigation reveals that there is indeed a strong relation between NBTI and the time a circuit remains in faulty state. Consequently, detection schemes must be adapted during circuit's operation to take aging into account in order to avoid that errors remain undetected.