Development of an Ultrafast On-the-Fly $I_{\rm DLIN}$ Technique to Study NBTI in Plasma and Thermal Oxynitride p-MOSFETs

Abstract

An ultrafast on-the-fly technique is developed to study linear drain current ( <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">I</i> <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DLIN</sub> ) degradation in plasma and thermal oxynitride p-MOSFETs during negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) stress. The technique enhances the measurement resolution (ldquotime-zerordquo delay) down to 1 mus and helps to identify several key differences in NBTI behavior between plasma and thermal films. The impact of the time-zero delay on time, temperature, and bias dependence of NBTI is studied, and its influence on extrapolated safe-operating overdrive condition is analyzed. It is shown that plasma-nitrided films, in spite of having higher <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> density, are less susceptible to NBTI than their thermal counterparts.