High-performance chip reliability from short-time-tests-statistical models for optical interconnect and HCI/TDDB/NBTI deep-submicron transistor failures

In high-performance chips, both Bragg gratings (used for signal separation in multi-signal optical interconnect alternatives to copper interconnect architectures) and deep-submicron transistors fail when the stress-induced activation of the performance enhancing hydrogen in the amorphous oxide generates enough defects to significantly degrade performance. By making an analogy to the more mature theory of Bragg gratings, disorder-induced variations in the activation (generation) energies of the defects, are shown to be a sufficient explanation for the sub-linear time dependence of HCI (hot carrier induced degradation), TDDB (time dependent dielectric [soft/hard] breakdown) and NBTI (negative bias temperature instability) deep-submicron transistor degradation modes. We then show that for all these degradation modes, Weibull (not lognormal as is sometimes assumed) intrinsic failure-time distributions result from the variations in defect activation energies and that the short-time device degradation can be used to extract tails of these semi-symmetric Weibull failure-time distributions. This also explains why Arrhenius defect generation rates yield nonArrhenius MTF in small devices. Combining the resulting failure statistics with a novel qualification methodology, “latent failures” can be avoided through design changes implemented for reliability