Trapping and trap generation studies on the gate oxide of MOSFETs

The trapping of charge carriers in SiO₂ under different charge injection conditions has received much attention by various researchers because of the related device degradation. The use of SiO ₂ layers as the gate insulator in VLSI MOS devices and especially in electrically erasable read-only memories (E²PROM) demands extremely low defect density. Moreover, the stability of the oxide properties under stress conditions is of great importance to long-term reliability of these and other small geometry MOS devices. In this work charge trapping and associated degradation in the thin gate oxide layer of commercial MOS transistors is investigated using the substrate hot electron (SHE) technique. The results show the injection current dependence of electron trapping and the effect of the electron energy at the time of injection on electron trapping