Multi-Phonon Processes as the Origin of Reliability Issues

Recently, correlated drain and gate current fluctuations have been observed in nano-scaled MOSFETs, indicating that their occurrence is linked to the same defect. One explanation for this observation can be given by the multi-state defect model, which has been developed to describe the hole capture and emission processes involved in the bias temperature instability (BTI). This model relies on a combination of metastable defect states and nonradiative multi-phonon transitions. Our detailed investigations demonstrate that the observed gate current fluctuations and their correlation with the drain noise can be well reproduced using a TAT mechanism based on the multi-state model.