Why hot carrier emission based timing probes will work for 50 nm, 1V CMOS technologies

The intensity of the hot-carrier light emission from advanced CMOS technolo gies will not decrease significantly below present levels in the next sever al years even as operating voltages approach 1V. Hot-luminescence technique s for circuit characterization such as PICA will remain viable over this pe riod. The effect on the emission intensity of the decreasing operating volt ages and device dimensions is dominated by the dependence of the hot-carrie r distribution on voltage. Calculations of hot-electron distribution functi ons for small nFETs including Coulomb scattering from the source and drain show that the distribution functions for energies greater than 1 eV will on ly decrease slightly as operating voltages scale to below I V. (C) 2001 Els evier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.