A NEW ANALYTIC MODEL FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF THE INTRINSIC OXIDE BREAKDOWN STATISTICS OF ULTRA-THIN OXIDES

The degradation of thin gate oxide is described as the continuous gene ration of electron traps, until a critical electron trap density is re ached, corresponding to the formation of a breakdown path. This proces s is described statistically resulting in an analytic expression of th e intrinsic Weibull distribution as a function of trap density. It can be concluded that the slope of the distribution increases with increa sing oxide thickness, because an increasing number of traps is require d to form the breakdown path. Also, the critical electron trap density increases with oxide thickness because longer paths have a lower prob ability of being well oriented to cause breakdown. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd