Review of carrier injection in the silicon/silicon-dioxide system

Abstract

A variety of carrier injection mechanisms have been proposed for the silicon/silicon-dioxide system. The discussion primarily centres on injection phenomena observed in both VLSI and ULSI devices and the ability of the proposed models to fit experimental data. The basic physics of the carrier injection mechanisms is reviewed, including the energy band diagrams and the resulting gate currents due to carrier injection. Both the advantages as well as the limitations of these models are examined.