A Simple Negative Bias Temperature Instability Characterization Methodology to Minimize the Immediate Recovery Effect during Measurement

Abstract

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) degradation of p-channel metal–oxide–semiconductor field effect transistors ( p-MOSFETs) is significantly underestimated by using the conventional characterization techniques due to a severe NBTI recovery during the measurements. In this work, a simple characterization method based on the single-point measurement of the saturated drain current is proposed to minimize the unwanted recovery effect. This method is accurate as is proven by a carefully-designed experiment. With this new proposed method, the measurement time is reduced to tens of milliseconds. This method gives a closer-to-real threshold voltage shift, and yields a more reliable power-law factor and thus a more realistic NBTI picture.