V-Forward Stress and V-Reverse Screen for Monitoring and Early Identification of Schottky Reliability

Low-power Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs), when used to sense memory cells, can be a reliability concern in bipolar random access memory (RAM). A V-forward stress is effective for monitoring SBD reliability, and a V-reverse screen is effective for identifying potential fails. V-forward stress fails can be modeled as a lognormal distribution in time and a limited percent defective with an Arrhenius temperature dependency.