Recovery Effect of Hot-Carrier Stress on γ-ray-Irradiated 0.13 μm Partially Depleted SOI n-MOSFETs

Abstract

Many silicon-on-insulator (SOI) metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are used in deep space detection systems because they have higher radiation resistance than bulk silicon devices. However, SOI devices have to face the double challenge of radiation and conventional reliability problems, such as hot carrier stress, at the same time. Thus, we wondered whether there is any interaction between reliability degradation and irradiation damage. In this paper, the effect of hot-carrier injection (HCI) on γ-ray-irradiated partially depleted (PD) SOI n-MOSFETs with a T-shaped gate structure is investigated. A strange phenomenon that accelerated the annealing effect on irradiation devices caused by HCI in 5 s was observed. That is, HCI has fast recovery ability on the irradiated narrow-channel n-MOSFETs. We explain the physical mechanism of this recovery effect qualitatively. Moreover, we designed a comparable experiment to evaluate the effect on the wide-channel devices. These results show that the narrow-channel devices are more sensitive to irradiation and HCI effects than wide-channel devices.