WLR monitoring stresses and suitable test structures for future product reliability targets

The demands on gate oxide qualification and monitoring and their limits are discussed in detail. Methods are presented to demonstrate the customers reliability requirements through a combination of experiments and extrapolation. The motivation for this work was the visualisation of the discrepancy between today's qualification and monitoring possibilities and tomorrow's customers targets. Realistically, the effort to demonstrate the reliability targets experimentally is limited and will be too high for future reliability targets. The paper consists of two main parts, a discussion of an approach to assess today's stringent failure rate targets through reliability measurements and the extrapolation of Weibull distributions. Steps towards building-in-reliability (BIR) are mentioned in this paper, when appropriate, but are not further discussed.