Non-invasive nature of corona charging on thermal Si/SiO2 structures

The corona charging technique is utilized in commercial semiconductor device reliability characterization tools and has been used in numerous electron spin resonance (ESR) experiments, by several groups to study defect centers in Si/SiO₂ system. A recent ESR study argues that the corona charging approaches are inherently unreliable and invasive. In this work we show that low-field corona biasing is essential non-invasive and thus can be utilized in both reliability characterization and fundamental studies of defect structures.