Incorporation of Temperature Impact on Hot-Carrier Degradation into Compact Physics Model

Abstract

We extend our compact physics model (CPM) for hot-carrier degradation (HCD) to cover the impact of ambient temperature on HCD. Three components of this impact are taken into account. First, variations in temperature perturb carrier transport. Second, the thermal component of Si-H bond rupture becomes more prominent at elevated temperatures. Third, vibrational lifetime of the bond decreases with temperature. While the first and the third mechanisms impede HCD, the second one accelerates this detrimental phenomenon. The aforementioned mechanisms are consolidated in our extended CPM, which was verified against experimental data acquired from foundry quality n-channel transistors with a gate length of 28 nm. For model validation, we use experimental data recorded using four combinations of gate and drain voltages and across a broad temperature range of 150–300 K. We demonstrate that the extended CPM is capable of reproducing measured degradation ΔId,lin(t) (normalized change of the linear drain current with stress time) traces with good accuracy over a broad temperature range.