Impact of hot-carrier degradation on drain-induced barrier lowering in multifin SOI n-Channel FinFETs with self-heating

Abstract

Application of high-frequency ac stress in the place of conventional dc stress is known to decrease the damage caused by self-heating (SH)-induced hot-carrier injection (HCI) in highly scaled MOSFET devices. However, the effect of hot-carrier degradation on short-channel performance is less explored. In this article, a detailed examination of the drain-induced barrier lowering (DIBL) under hot-carrier stress is presented for 14-nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) n-channel FinFETs. In particular, the influence of SH-enhanced HCI on DIBL is thoroughly investigated for devices with different geometrical parameters including a number of fins, gate length, and so on at different ac stress frequencies. The change in dominant degrading mechanism from bulk oxide trapping to interface state generation under dc and ac stress is shown to affect DIBL severely. Interestingly, the effect of SH on DIBL is in contrast to that in ON-current degradation. Furthermore, time evolution of DIBL degradation for asynchronous stress waveforms is studied for accurate reliability analysis for short-channel devices.