Impact of instrumental current scatter on fast Bias Temperature Instability testing

To minimize charge relaxation during Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) tests, fast current sensing has become the mainstream methodology in recent years and fast source measurement units are now available commercially. In these instruments, the measurement delay and sampling time have to been significant reduced in order to meet the more stringent methodology specification of fast BTI testing. In this paper, the impact of these speed improvements in two commercially available source measurement units (SMUs) on the accuracy of threshold voltage measurements during fast BTI testing is studied in detail.