On the universality of negative bias temperature degradation

Over last five years, many industrial/academic research groups have characterized the NBTI degradation through power-law exponents, universality of relaxation, frequency and duty cycle dependencies by using a wide variety of characterization techniques. The scatter in the data has inspired a range of modeling efforts regarding NBTI degradation, with important implications for projected lifetime and technology qualification. In this talk, we will show that the scatter in the data hides a simple universality of the degradation characteristics and that universality of data imposes strict consistency requirements for NBTI theories. We conclude by showing that the existing protocol for qualification and circuit design are theoretically sound, and can be used without significant revision/refinement.