R. Bellens et al., BUILDING-IN RELIABILITY DURING LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT - HOT-CARRIER DEGRADATION IS NO LONGER A PROBLEM OF THE TECHNOLOGISTS ONLY, Microelectronics and reliability, 37(10-11), 1997, pp. 1425-1428
Based on experimentally obtained data on different 0.35-mu m CMOS tech
nologies, hot-carrier (HC) degradation is shown to be one of the most
critical reliability issues of this technology generation. By scaling
the dimensions without scaling the power supply voltage, the transisto
r HC lifetime has decreased so severely that the conventional design-d
ependent HC reliability requirements are no longer fulfilled. Therefor
e, the transistor HC performance needs to be taken into account alread
y during the development of the standard library cells. In this paper,
a case study will be presented that shows that building-in reliabilit
y during library development can relax the HC requirements during proc
ess qualification significantly while maintaining the product reliabil
ity. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.