Recent advances in understanding the bias temperature instability

Abstract

Our understanding of the bias temperature instability (BTI) has been plagued by disagreements related to measurement issues. Although even in the early papers on BTI the existence of recovery was acknowledged and discussed, for unknown reasons this had little impact on the way we used to think about the phenomenon until recently. Even after the re-discovery of recovery, it took a few years until it was fully appreciated that any measurement scheme conceived so far considerably interferes with the degradation it is supposed to measure, often accelerating its recovery. Nonetheless, this experimental nuisance has led researchers to think in more detail about the problem and has thus opened the floodgates for fresh ideas. Some of these ideas together with the experimental data supporting them are reviewed in the following.