RELIABILITY OF MOS DEVICES

Abstract

The scaling trends in CMOS technology and operating conditions give rise to serious degradation mechanisms such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) and Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) in MOSFETs. These mechanisms affect the MOSFET's performance and give threatening the circuit and product lifetimes. The aging phenomena, on top of process variations, translate into complexity and reduced design margin for circuits. A very important factor in the reliability of MOS devices is the stability of the threshold voltage. This dissertation examines the effects of different form of bias stresses at different temperatures on the drift in the threshold voltage of MOS field effect transistors.