Can macroscopic oxide thickness uniformity improve oxide reliability?

In this work, we investigated both experimentally and numerically the impac t of macroscopic oxide thickness uniformity on Weibull breakdown characteri stics for both Weibull parameters, namely, the characteristics times (T-63) and Weibull slopes (beta) over a wide range of oxide thickness. A detailed full scale Monte Carlo analysis is used to examine the breakdown character istics at low-percentile and its sensitivity to variation of thickness depe ndence of time-to-breakdown and Weibull slopes. We show that for thinner ox ides with very shallow Weibull slopes the impact of thickness variation is drastically reduced as compared to thicker oxides for the same parameters.