On the limits of applicability of drift-diffusion based hot carrier degradation modeling

Abstract

We study the limits of the applicability of a drift-diffusion (DD) based model for hot-carrier degradation (HCD). In this approach the rigorous but computationally expensive solution of the Boltzmann transport equation is replaced by an analytic expression for the carrier energy distribution function. On the one hand, we already showed that the simplified version of our HCD model is quite successful for LDMOS devices. On the other hand, hot carrier degradation models based on the drift-diffusion and energy transport schemes were shown to fail for planar MOSFETs with gate lengths of 0.5-2.0 µm. To investigate the limits of validity of the DD-based HCD model, we use planar nMOSFETs of an identical topology but with different gate lengths of 2.0, 1.5, and 1.0 µm. We show that, although the model is able to adequately represent the linear and saturation drain current changes in the 2.0 µm transistor, it starts to fail for gate lengths shorter than 1.5 µm and becomes completely inadequate for the 1.0 µm device.