A Comparative NBTI Study of HfO(2), HfSiO(x), and SiON p-MOSFETs Using UF-OTF I(DLIN) Technique

Abstract

The time, temperature, and oxide-field dependence of negative-bias temperature instability is studied in HfO(2)/TiN, HfSiO(x)/TiN, and SiON/poly-Si p-MOSFETs using ultrafast on-the-fly I(DLIN) technique capable of providing measured degradation from very short (approximately microseconds) to long stress time. Similar to rapid thermal nitrided oxide (RTNO) SiON, HfO(2) devices show very high temperature-independent degradation at short (submilliseconds) stress time, not observed for plasma nitrided oxide (PNO) SiON and HfSiO(x) devices. HfSiO(x) shows lower overall degradation, higher long-time power-law exponent, field acceleration, and temperature activation as compared to HfO(2), which are similar to the differences between PNO and RTNO SiON devices, respectively. The difference between HfsiO(x) and HfO(2) can be attributed to differences in N density in the SiO(2) IL of these devices.