Measurement and modeling of the annealing kinetics of stress induced leakage current in ultra-thin oxides

The annealing properties of the stress induced leakage current (SILC) for 55 and 65 A thick oxides are investigated. It is demonstrated that the SILC is a fully reversible degradation process and that its generation kinetics are nearly unchanged after successive stressing/annealing cycles. The activation energy and diffusion coefficient of the annealing process has been extracted and shown to be independent of oxide thickness. Moreover the annealing kinetics are quantitatively simulated using a drift-diffusion model with the experimentally extracted parameters.