On the microscopic limit of the modified reaction-diffusion model for the negative bias temperature instability

It has recently been proposed that the inability of the reaction-diffusion model for the negative bias temperature instability to properly predict the experimentally observed recovery transients is due to the incomplete description of atomic motion in the one dimensional macroscopic formulation of the theory. In order to investigate this claim, we develop a microscopic formulation of the modified reaction-diffusion model and simulate it using the kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm. The results of the macroscopic and the atomistic formulation are compared. It shows that the recovery behavior predicted by the RD theory is not affected by the change of the formulation. However, differences arise for the degradation behavior, which, as the microscopic formulation is the physically more accurate description, raise questions regarding the physical relevance of the reaction-diffusion theory. In extension it is shown that any rate-equation based description in the atomic level context will be unable to properly describe the early stages of degradation.