Interrelationship of voltage and temperature dependence of oxide breakdown for ultrathin oxides

Abstract

We report that voltage acceleration of time- or charge-to-breakdown is insensitive to temperature variations over a wide range of temperature (30 to 200/spl deg/C) for oxides below 3 nm, regardless of oxide process, injection polarity or device type (NFET, PFET). Based on this observation, an essentially universal, non-Arrhenius temperature dependence for ultrathin oxide is obtained by a natural normalization scheme. The consequences of these findings for reliability projection are discussed.