Reliability issues of ultra thin silicon nitride (a-SiN:H) by hot wire CVD for deep sub-micron CMOS technologies

Abstract

The reliability of gate dielectric is of high importance, especially as its thickness is reaching atomic dimensions. The gate leakage currents and the operating fields can be very high in devices with these ultra thin gate dielectrics. Several anomalous degradation mechanisms and breakdown characteristics are observed in these devices. New phenomena such as quasi breakdown and SILC are now considered important for accurate reliability assessment In this work we investigate a systematic reliability evaluation of high quality MNS devices made with ultra thin HWCVD nitride as the gate dielectric by taking into account these newer effects.