Simulation of soft and hard breakdown of ultra-thin gate oxides

Abstract

Based on the theory of percolation, we develop a general model to simulate soft and hard breakdown of gate oxides. In this paper, we model the effect of the constant stress in reliability tests as a constant defect generation rate to simulate the time dependent dielectric breakdown. We show that the soft and hard breakdown are the results of two different natures of phase transitions, critical and quasi-critical, in thick and ultra-thin oxides, respectively.