Modeling the Effect of Random Dopants on Hot-Carrier Degradation in FinFETs

Abstract

We present the first physics-based approach to modeling the effect of random dopants on hot-carrier degradation (HCD) in FinFETs, which is based on a statistical analysis of HCD performed over an ensemble of 200 transistors with different random dopant configurations. As a reference, the results obtained with the deterministic version of our HCD model are used. The statistical analysis shows that degradation traces and device lifetimes have quite broad distributions and that the deterministic model tends to overestimate HCD and makes pessimistic predictions on device lifetime. Moreover, lifetime distributions evaluated for high stress voltages and for biases close to the operating regimes have different shapes which makes backward lifetime extrapolation challenging, thereby demonstrating that full physics-based HCD treatment is of crucial importance.