Progressive breakdown statistics in ultra-thin silicon dioxides

We report an area-dependent gate current increase in 13.4 /spl Aring/ oxide. Area dependence studies show that larger sample have smaller current density increases. Using leakage current density increase as failure criterion, it was shown that smaller area samples will have shorter lifetime. By using a discrete current formalism to describe the multiple degraded spots, it was shown that leakage current can be used to deduce that distribution statistics of the oxide and that the multiple spots distribution model can be described by Weibull's statistics.