An array-based test circuit for fully automated gate dielectric breakdown characterization

John Keane; Shrinivas Venkatraman; Paulo Butzen; Chris H. Kim

doi:10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2041258

An array-based test circuit for fully automated gate dielectric breakdown characterization

John Keane, Shrinivas Venkatraman, Paulo Butzen, Chris H. Kim

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose an array-based test circuit for efficiently characterizing gate dielectric breakdown. Such a design is highly beneficial when studying this statistical process, where up to thousands of samples are needed to create an accurate time to breakdown Weibull distribution. The proposed circuit also facilitates investigations of any spatial correlation of dielectric failures, and can monitor a progressive decrease in gate resistance. Measurement results are presented from a 32 × 32 test array implemented in a 130-nm bulk CMOS process. Results show that this system is capable of taking accurate measurements across a range of voltages and temperatures, which is critical for extrapolating accelerated stress experiment results to expected device lifetimes under realistic operating conditions.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	5418862
Pages (from-to)	787-795
Number of pages	9
Journal	IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume	19
Issue number	5
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2041258
State	Published - May 2011

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received August 29, 2009; revised December 14, 2009. First published February 22, 2010; current version published April 27, 2011. This work was supported in part by the SRC under Award 2008-HJ-1805, along with Sam-sung, Intel, IBM, TI, and UMC.

Keywords

Aging
circuit reliability
dielectric breakdown
digital measurements

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10.1109/TVLSI.2010.2041258

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An array-based test circuit for fully automated gate dielectric breakdown characterization

Abstract

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