Title :
Can hot carriers “break” thermal oxide
Author_Institution :
Space & Syst. Technol. Group, Motorola Inc., Scottsdale, AZ, USA
Abstract :
This article was written to understand a comment that was given at the Question and Answer period of a paper presented at ESREF 96 in Enschede, The Netherlands, last October. The question was: “Your model includes only temperature and electric field in dielectric breakdown. We are able to break oxides with no field at all (i.e. with hot carriers). How can you explain that?” This study was conducted to simply calculate the likelihood of breaking Si-O bonds with hot carriers. The calculations indicate that while it is possible for hot carriers to populate traps causing voltage threshold shifting, it is not possible to break an oxide with hot carriers
Keywords :
bonds (chemical); dielectric thin films; electric breakdown; hot carriers; silicon compounds; Si-O bond breaking; SiO2; dielectric breakdown; hot carriers; thermal oxide; trap population; voltage threshold shifting; Breakdown voltage; Electric breakdown; Electron traps; Hot carriers; Probability; Space technology; Surface treatment; Testing; Threshold voltage; Tunneling;
Conference_Titel :
Integrated Reliability Workshop, 1996., IEEE International
Conference_Location :
Lake Tahoe, CA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-3598-8
DOI :
10.1109/IRWS.1996.583405
