Investigation of temperature acceleration of thin oxide time-to-breakdown

We study the effect of elevated temperature on the thin oxide breakdown. We find that the Arrhenius law does not describe the process well-in contrast to that we observe the log of the time-to-breakdown to scale linearly with temperature for a wide range of oxide thicknesses. We further observe that both the hole fluence and the neutral electron trap density at breakdown d ecrease at increased temperatures and do not reach constant critical values . We also show how elevated temperature affects:the reliability of oxide fi lms and predict insufficient reliability for oxides below 2.5 - 2.8 nm.