On the importance of electron–electron scattering for hot-carrier degradation

Abstract

Using our physics based model for hot-carrier degradation (HCD) we analyze the importance of the effect of electron–electron scattering (EES) on HCD in transistors with different channel lengths. The model is based on a thorough treatment of carrier transport and is implemented into the deterministic Boltzmann transport equation solver ViennaSHE. Two competing mechanism of Si–H bond-breakage are captured by the model: the one triggered by the multiple vibrational excitation of the bond and another which is due to excitation of one of the bonding electrons to an antibonding state by a solitary hot carrier. These processes are considered self-consistently as competing pathways of the same dissociation reaction. To analyze the importance of the EES process we use a series of nMOSFETs with identical architecture but different gate lengths. The gate length varies in the wide range of 44–300 nm to cover short-channel MOSFETs as well as their longer counterparts. According to previous findings, EES starts to become important at a channel length of 180 nm. This situation is captured in the targeted gate length interval. Our results show that the channel length alone is not a sufficient criterion on the importance of EES and that the applied bias conditions have to be taken into account as well.