Simulating hot-carrier effects on circuit performance

Hot carriers cause charge trapping in the gate oxide of MOSFETs and generate interface traps at Si/SiO₂ interfaces of MOSFETs and bipolar transistors. Models for N-channel and P-channel MOSFETs and for bipolar transistor degradations have been developed and implemented in an IC reliability simulator BERT. Several comparisons between simulation results and measurements are shown. There remain to be answered questions concerning the presence of excess degradation when the stressing signal frequency is high.