Characterization of hot-carrier degradation in non-isolated MOSFETs using a new gate-current measurement technique

With the continual miniaturization of MOS devices, hot-carrier degradation has become a major reliability issue. Several techniques have been developed to characterize the hot-carrier degradation in MOSFETs. Of these, the gate-current measurement and charge-pumping techniques have been shown to be particularly attractive. However, only the gate-current measurement technique can be used on non-isolated, practical devices. A new gate-current measurement technique is developed, which requires a much shorter time to obtain the I_g-V_g characteristic curves of MOSFETs as compared to the conventional floating gate technique