Gate-Oxide Breakage Assisted by HCI in Advanced STI DeMOS Transistors

This letter provides, for the first time, experimental evidence supporting that hot-carrier injection not only degrades electrical performance in drain-extended MOS transistors with shallow trench isolation (STI DeMOS) but also induces a severe gate-oxide (Gox) degradation and wear-out of the oxide. During the Gox degradation at high-stress conditions, a steep increase of interface traps (N_it) and oxide traps (N_ot) is detected in the accumulation region by using charge pumping. A subsequent fast degradation of the device electrical characteristics is observed.