A novel methodology for sensing the breakdown location and its application to the reliability study of ultrathin Hf-silicate gate dielectrics

In this paper, we propose a new methodology for sensing the breakdown location along the channel length with the MOSFET biased in the inversion regime. The usefulness of this technique is demonstrated in the characterization of ultrathin Hf-silicate gate dielectrics breakdown. Two different breakdown modes are deconvoluted: an initial progressive breakdown in the channel with a degradation rate strongly dependent on the applied voltage and a successive hard-breakdown at source and drain extensions, which more impacts the device reliability.