Reliability of MOL local interconnects

From the 32nm CMOS node on, trench shaped local interconnects are introduced to connect the individual transistors on a chip. Aggressive pitch scaling and overlay errors however challenge the integrity of the SiN dielectric between the gate and the local interconnects. In this work we study the reliability of this dielectric. It is found that the current between gate and the contacts is polarity independent and the breakdown voltage shows a strong polarity dependence. While within die good uniformity is observed, due to overlay errors the spacing between the gate and the contact varies across the wafer. This results in large VBD and tBD variability and for an intrinsic TDDB lifetime extrapolation correction for this non-uniformity required.