Bias temperature instability and its correlation to flicker (1/f) noise in FinFETs

Abstract

Flicker noise is used as a diagnostic tool to analyze the degradation mechanism before and after BTI in thin and thick gate oxide FinFETs. Although nFETs show lower BTI than pFETs for thick gate oxides, comparable BTI degradation is noticed between thin gate oxide nFETs and pFETs. Analyses of noise spectra reveal that: the degradation of oxide occurs closer to metal gate rather than channel during BTI. The distance between the defect location and channel plays an important role in noise mechanism for nMOS. As the defects are closer to the channel and coulombic scattering is enhanced, the noise in nFETs is modified from carrier number fluctuation to mobility fluctuation model.