High field effects in MOSFETS

"High field effects", such as hot-carrier effects and dielectric breakdown, which most significantly affect VLSI reliability are discussed. This paper describes: 1) the hot-carrier injection mechanism and modeling; 2) degradation characteristics: low voltage and low temperature hot-carrier effects, the influence of new processes and materials, degradation modeling, and the TDDB vs. hot-carrier phenomena; 3) hot-carrier resistant device structures and dielectrics, and the additional device breakdown phenomena (drain sustaining and gate-assisted surface breakdown); 4) new power supply voltage and the influence of hot-carrier effects on circuit noise and VLSI design methodology. These effects in MOSFETs inherent to device down-scaling impose the most stringent constraints on submicron MOS VLSI design, even after the power supply voltage is reduced to ∼ 3V.