Analysis of the charge pumping technique and its application for the evaluation of MOSFET degradation

It is shown that the charge pumping technique is able not only to determine the degradation mechanisms in MOS transistors under all kinds of aging conditions (e.g., irradiation, hot-carrier, Fowler-Nordheim stress), but also in several cases to evaluate and to quantify the degradation. It is further shown that the technique can be applied to separate the presence of fixed oxide changes due to charge trapping and the generation of interface traps. It can be used to analyze degradations that occur uniformly over the transistor channel, as well as strongly localized transistor degradations (e.g., for the case of hot-carrier degradations). All possible cases of uniform and nonuniform degradations, for p-channel as well as for n-channel transistors, are described, and for most of them experimental examples are given