Reliability of thin SiO/sub 2/ at direct-tunneling voltages

Abstract

We investigate the factors that impact thickness scaling of silicon dioxide gate insulators in VLSI technology. At low voltages, the direct-tunneling mechanism is shown to result in oxide leakage current orders-of-magnitude higher than predicted by Fowler-Nordheim theory. Both intrinsic and defect oxide breakdown reliability is accurately predicted at low voltages using the anode hole injection model. The stability of device parameters is investigated to show feasible MOSFET operation in the low voltage, direct-tunneling regime.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>