Noninvasive nature of corona charging on thermal Si∕SiO2 structures

Abstract

The corona charging technique is widely utilized in commercial Si∕SiO2 semiconductor device reliability characterization tools and has been used in numerous electron spin resonance (ESR) experiments, by several groups to study defect centers in Si∕SiO2 system. A recent ESR study argued that the corona charging approaches are inherently unreliable and invasive. In this work we show that this is not the case. We find that low-field corona biasing is essentially noninvasive and thus can be utilized in both reliability characterization and fundamental studies of defect structures.