Measurement and modeling of the annealing kinetics of stress induced leakage current in ultra-thin oxides

The annealing properties of the stress induced leakage current (SILC) for 5 5 and 65 Angstrom thick oxides are investigated. It is demonstrated that th e SILC is a fully reversible degradation process and that its generation ki netics are nearly unchanged after successive stressing/annealing cycles, Th e activation energy and diffusion coefficient of the annealing process has been extracted and shown to be independent of oxide thickness. Moreover the annealing kinetics are quantitatively simulated using a drift-diffusion mo del with the experimentally extracted parameters. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.