Quantitative electrically detected magnetic resonance for device reliability studies

Electrically detected magnetic resonance (EDMR) is a valuable tool for studying a variety of reliability problems, including the negative-bias temperature instability, total ionizing dose radiation damage, and instability in high-K gate stack-based MOS devices. Although conventional high-field EDMR can provide identification of the physical and chemical nature of electrically active reliability dominating defects in microelectronic devices, all of the EDMR studies to date have been limited by one significant shortcoming: EDMR is not quantitative. Although a large EDMR response generally corresponds to a high defect density and a small EDMR response corresponds to a low one, it has not been possible to assign actual numbers to the defect densities detected via EDMR. We´ve solved this problem.