Physical understanding of hot carrier injection variability in deeply scaled nMOSFETs

The saturation current variability σ(δ I dsat ) and lifetime variability in hot carrier injection (HCI) have been investigated for deeply scaled nMOSFETs. It is found that both of them are getting worse with scaling down. The statistical analysis of the large data sets from various CMOS sizes shows that σ(δ I dsat ) is dominated by the total number of Poisson-distributed defects generated by HCI stress and the length ( L ) and width ( W ) of these devices. We attempt to use a single parameter to accurately describe HCI variability in deeply scaled nMOSFETs.