BUILDING-IN RELIABILITY DURING LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT - HOT-CARRIER DEGRADATION IS NO LONGER A PROBLEM OF THE TECHNOLOGISTS ONLY

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.