Initial and long-term frequency degradation of ring oscillators caused by plasma-induced damage in 65 nm bulk and fully depleted silicon-on-insulator processes

Abstract

The degradation of reliability caused by plasma-induced damage (PID) has become a significant concern with the miniaturization of device size. In particular, it is difficult to relieve PID in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) because it contains buried oxide (BOX) layers. In this work, we compare PID between a bulk and a silicon on thin BOX (SOTB), which has BOX layers of less than 10 nm. We measure frequencies of ring oscillators with an antenna structure on a single stage. In the bulk, PID is relieved by first connecting an antenna to a drain because electric charge flows to a substrate. The difference in initial frequency is 0.79% between structures, which cause and relieve PID. SOTB also relieves the same amount of PID. Initial frequencies are affected by PID, but there is no effect of PID on the long-term degradation mainly caused by bias temperature instability (BTI).