Modeling of hot-carrier degradation based on thorough carrier transport treatment

Abstract

We present and validate a physics-basedmodel for hot-carrier degradation. The model is based on a thorough carrier transport treatment by means of an exact solution of the Boltzmann transport equation. Such important ingredients relevant for hot-carrier degradation as the competing mechanisms of bond dissociation, electron-electron scattering, the activation energy reduction due to the interaction of the dipole moment of the bond with the electric field as well as statistical fluctuations of this energy are incorporated in our approach. The model is validated in order to represent the linear drain current change in three different devices subjected to hot-carrier stress under different conditions. The main demand is that the model has to use a unique set of parameters. We analyze the importance of all the model ingredients, especially the role of electron-electron scattering. We check the idea that the channel/gate length of the device alone is not enough to judge whether electron-electron scattering is important or not and instead a combination of the device topology and stress conditions needs to be used.