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Fundamentals of Bias Temperature Instability in MOS Transistors pp 43–92Cite as

Characterization Methods for BTI Degradation and Associated Gate Insulator Defects

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Part of the book series: Springer Series in Advanced Microelectronics ((MICROELECTR.,volume 52))

Abstract

In this chapter, different characterization methods are discussed to determine BTI degradation of MOSFET parameters and to directly estimate the pre-existing and generated gate insulator defects responsible for BTI. V T shift is obtained from full I D–V G sweeps and also from spot I D measurements at fixed V G; one spot measurements are performed either on-the-fly at stress V G or by dropping down to a lower V G from stress. Impact of measurement delay and mobility degradation on V T extracted from different methods is discussed. Flicker noise method is used to access the density of pre-existing defects for different gate insulator processes. Gated diode or DCIV, charge pumping (CP) and low voltage SILC methods are used to determine trap generation at or near the interface between Si channel and gate insulator. Conventional SILC is used to estimate generation of bulk gate insulator defects. Different artifacts related to improper choice of stress bias and measurement delay are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For NBTI stress, low and high values correspond to the magnitude of gate pulse.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge E. Naresh Kumar and Vrajesh Maheta for OTF measurements, Gautam Kapila and Bijesh Rajamohanan for flicker noise measurements, Dhanoop Varghese for CP measurements and Applied Materials for providing devices used in this work.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Souvik Mahapatra, Nilesh Goel, Ankush Chaudhary, Kaustubh Joshi & Subhadeep Mukhopadhyay

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Mahapatra, S., Goel, N., Chaudhary, A., Joshi, K., Mukhopadhyay, S. (2016). Characterization Methods for BTI Degradation and Associated Gate Insulator Defects. In: Mahapatra, S. (eds) Fundamentals of Bias Temperature Instability in MOS Transistors. Springer Series in Advanced Microelectronics, vol 52. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2508-9_2

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