Temperature-dependent Reliability Research Articles

Temperature Dependent Reliability of Polysilicon Emitter Bipolar Transistors Under High Current Stress

Temperature dependent high forward current stress induced drift of electrical parameters (current gain ( ${\beta }$ ) variations, emitter resistance ( R $_{E}$ ) decrease) in polysilicon emitter bipolar transistors has been revealed. It shows that the ambient temperature surrounding the test device, i.e., the lattice temperature, plays a key role in the reliability issues of the polysilicon emitter bipolar junction transistors under high forward current stress. However, both results from technology computer-aided design (TCAD) simulation and experimental test indicate that the junction temperature only rise up to a certain extent but not very high, i.e., the widely reported self-heating effect is not the essential reason for the device damage in the case of double-polysilicon self-aligned NPN bipolar junction transistor.

ILLIADS-T: an electrothermal timing simulator for temperature-sensitive reliability diagnosis of CMOS VLSI chips

In this paper, we present a new chip-level electrothermal timing simulator for CMOS VLSI circuits. Given the chip layout, the packaging specification, and the periodic input signal pattern, it finds the on-chip steady-state temperature profile and the resulting circuit performance. A tester chip has been designed for verification of ILLIADS-T, and very good agreement between simulation and experiment was found. Using this electrothermal simulator, temperature-dependent reliability and timing problems of VLSI circuits can be accurately identified.