Oxide-Thickness Determination in Thin-Insulator MOS Structures

Abstract

A novel technique is presented to electrically determine the oxide thickness (and, in some cases, the flat-band voltage and surface doping as well) of thin-insulator MOS structures. Differently from established methods, that of this work does not require a model for either the accumulated or inverted semiconductor interface but assumes only that the classical MOS theory holds for zero surface band bending. By means of numerical simulations and comparison with high-resolution measurements obtained with transmission-electron micros-copy, the technique is found to be valid well beyond the conditions for which it has been mathematically derived and to be applicable in almost all cases of practical interest. © 1988 IEEE