Recent developments in understanding the bias temperature instability

The bias temperature instability (BTI) is one of the most imporant and controversial reliability issues in modern semiconductor devices. Recent modeling activities ascribe the phenomenon to the collective action of a large number of defects with widely distributed time constants. Using an analytic distribution of these time constants, highly-accurate closed-form expressions for BTI have been derived and recently extended to the high-frequency AC stress case. We review these latest efforts and demonstrate the validity of the model for a number of different technologies.