Influence and model of gate oxide breakdown on CMOS inverters

Abstract

We have investigated and modelled the effect of oxide breakdown (BD) on the performance of CMOS inverters. The results show that the inverter performance can be affected by the breakdown in a different way depending on the stress polarity applied to the inverter input. In all the cases, the oxide breakdown conduction has been modeled as gate-to-diffusion leakage with a power law formula of the type I= KVp which was previously found to describe the breakdown in capacitor structures. This model has been used to analyze the effect of the oxide BD on other circuits as ring oscillators and SRAM cells. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.