Fast hot-carrier aging method of charging damage measurement

To monitor plasma-charging damage, it is well known that one must not overlook the latent defects that are created by the damage but are not readily observable by most commonly used measurement methods. These latent defects are either passivated defects due to temperature cycling after the defects are created, or simply due to charge detrapping that render the defects invisible to many measurements. The common way to reveal these latent defects is to look for accelerated degradation of device parameters under electrical stress. A common stressing method is uniform Fowler-Nordheim tunneling through the gate-oxide. A less often used method is channel hot-carrier stress (Hook et al., Proc. P2ID96, p. 164, 1996). In this paper, we have demonstrated the suitability of using very short hot-carrier stress time to monitor plasma charging damage without the use of a very high acceleration voltage. When the stress is long enough to extract the lifetime from a large number of devices, the method allows us to find the intrinsic (damage free) lifetime of a particular transistor design. This ability to determine how much the devices are degraded quantitatively without the help of a reference device is unique among plasma-charging damage measurement methods