DC and AC NBTI Stresses in PMOSFETs with PE-SiN Capping

PMOS negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) is known to be a critical reliability concern and represents one of the major bottlenecks for product lifetime (Ogawa et al., 1995) and (La Rosa et al., 1997). It had also been shown that the device lifetime under dynamic stress could be much longer than that under static stress (Chen et al., 2003). Recently, using process technique to induce uniaxial strain in the channel (Ootsuka et al., 2000) and (Mistry et al., 2004) has received a lot of attention. However, the NBTI issue of these strained devices has not been carefully addressed. In this work, we investigate the static and dynamic NBTI of pMOSFETs with compressively strained channel