Abstract
Soft breakdown (SBD) and hard breakdown (HBD) mechanisms have been studied for 2.2-4.9-nm-thick gate oxides. The charge-to-soft breakdown (QSBD) is correlated to the incremental change in the stress-induced current at the time-to-soft breakdown (tSBD) under constant voltage stress, while the charge-to-hard breakdown (QBD) exhibits no correlation with change in the stress-induced current because of the temporal fluctuation of the SBD current. By noting that strained Si–O–Si bonds existing in SiO2 within 1.5 nm of the SiO2/Si(100) interface could be defect precursors which cause the SBD, time-dependent dielectric soft breakdown in ultrathin gate oxides is consistently explained by the thermochemical electric field model. It is shown that SBD and HBD are caused by a common physical mechanism.
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