Ultra-thin gate dielectric reliability projections

Phenomenological time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) and bias-temperature instability (BTI) models are demonstrated to enable reasonably accurate reliability projections for several generations of silicon oxynitride-based transistors and circuits with EOT down to ∼1.3 nm. Furthermore, while reliability and performance can be traded-off by engineering the gate dielectric coupled with device integration, benchmarking of published data suggests that the reliability achievable at each transistor node falls within an intrinsically plausible range for similar dielectric films. A preliminary investigation of high-k dielectric device reliability suggests that a similar methodology can be adopted to project the reliability of scaled high-k films.