A detailed study of soft- and pre-soft-breakdowns in small geometry MOS structures

Author

Sakura, T. ; Utsunomiya, H. ; Kamakura, Y. ; Taniguchi, K.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. & Inf. Syst., Osaka Univ., Japan

fYear

1998

fDate

6-9 Dec. 1998

Firstpage

183

Lastpage

186

Abstract

A new soft breakdown (SBD) model in weakly stressed thin gate oxides is proposed. Anomalous leakage current prior to soft breakdown is observed under weak current stress, which strongly indicates the cause of erratic retention error in flash memories. Further current stress induces two types of soft breakdown originating from the same precursor, i.e. multi-step tunneling. One of the SBD features current fluctuation accompanying non-switching 1/f noise and the other random telegraph noise. The difference between the two SBD modes reflect the consequence of different amount of Joule heat damage.

Keywords

1/f noise; MIS structures; flash memories; leakage currents; random noise; semiconductor device breakdown; tunnelling; 1/f noise; Joule heating; MOS structure; current fluctuation; current stress; flash memory; gate oxide; leakage current; random telegraph noise; soft breakdown; tunneling; Breakdown voltage; Current measurement; Degradation; Electric breakdown; Fluctuations; Geometry; Leakage current; MOS capacitors; Stress measurement; Tail;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Electron Devices Meeting, 1998. IEDM '98. Technical Digest., International

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA, USA

ISSN

0163-1918

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4774-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IEDM.1998.746315

Filename

746315