Fast Wafer-Level Stress-and-Sense Methodology for Characterization of Ring-Oscillator Degradation in Advanced CMOS Technologies

Ring oscillators (ROs) are widely used to study the degradation of logic CMOS circuits. To successfully link the time dependence of the ROs frequency degradation to the degradation of discrete device, we introduce a novel, fast wafer-level stress-and-sense methodology. With this new methodology, we unambiguously show the close correlation between discrete device degradation and circuit aging at typical wafer-level stress times.