From oxide breakdown to device failure: an overview of post-breakdown phenomena in ultrathin gate oxides

In this paper, we present an overview of post-BD phenomena in ultra thin (1nm < T_OX < 3 nm) oxides and couple this description to a discussion of the different methodologies proposed to deal with the post-BD reliability. We focus on the complete description of the statistics of the time to device failure (t_FAIL) and of the residual time (t_RES) from oxide BD to device failure, and on their scaling properties. Both intrinsic and extrinsic BD modes will be considered and the impact of burn-in will be briefly analyzed