Random telegraph noise in highly scaled nMOSFETs

Abstract

Recently, 1/f and random telegraph noise (RTN) studies have been used to infer information about bulk dielectric defects' spatial and energetic distributions. These analyses rely on a noise framework which involves charge exchange between the inversion layer and the bulk dielectric defects via elastic tunneling. In this study, we extracted the characteristic capture and emission time constants from RTN in highly scaled nMOSFETs and showed that they are inconsistent with the elastic tunneling picture dictated by the physical thickness of the gate dielectric (1.4 nm). Consequently, our results suggest that an alternative model is required and that a large body of the recent RTN and 1/ƒ noise defect profiling literature very likely needs to be re-interpreted.