From oxide breakdown to device failure: an overview of post-breakdown phenomena in ultrathin gate oxides

In this paper, we present an overview of post-BD phenomena in ultra thin (1nm < TOX < 3 nm) oxides and couple this description to a discussion of the different methodologies proposed to deal with the post-BD reliability. We focus on the complete description of the statistics of the time to device failure (tFAIL) and of the residual time (tRES) from oxide BD to device failure, and on their scaling properties. Both intrinsic and extrinsic BD modes will be considered and the impact of burn-in will be briefly analyzed