Modeling of Hot-Carrier Degradation in nLDMOS Devices: Different Approaches to the Solution of the Boltzmann Transport Equation

Abstract

We propose two different approaches to describe carrier transport in n-laterally diffused MOS (nLDMOS) transistor and use the calculated carrier energy distribution as an input for our physical hot-carrier degradation (HCD) model. The first version relies on the solution of the Boltzmann transport equation using the spherical harmonics expansion method, while the second uses the simpler drift-diffusion (DD) scheme. We compare these two versions of our model and show that both approaches can capture HCD. We, therefore, conclude that in the case of nLDMOS devices, the DD-based variant of the model provides good accuracy and at the same time is computationally less expensive. This makes the DD-based version attractive for predictive HCD simulations of LDMOS transistors.