The Role of High-Field Stress in the Negative Bias Temperature Instability

Published

December 1, 2010

Author(s)

Jason P. Campbell, Kin P. Cheung, John S. Suehle, A Oates

Abstract

In this study, a fast drain current measurement methodology which supports the standard threshold voltage and transconductance extractions associated with the fast dynamic negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) is presented. Using this methodology, we show that production quality transistors exhibit only minimal degradation after a brief stress at moderate to high dielectric fields (contrary to the peculiar excessive degradation reported frequently in the recent literature). The degradation at stress conditions consistent with many recent NBTI studies is shown to be dominated by high-field stress, instead of NBTI. The ability to extract transconductance from fast drain current measurements helps to identify the existence of a latent electron trapping/de-trapping component which provides further support of a degradation mechanism dominated by high-field stress. This high-field stress component, while dominating, has not been accounted for in most of the recent NBTI literature.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability

Volume

10

Issue

4

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

NBTI, High-Field Stress, hole-trapping, electron-trapping

Citation

Campbell, J. , Cheung, K. , Suehle, J. and Oates, A. (2010), The Role of High-Field Stress in the Negative Bias Temperature Instability, IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=902186 (Accessed October 2, 2025)