Hot Carrier Injection Reliability in Nanoscale Field Effect Transistors: Modeling and Simulation Methods

Hot carrier injection (HCI) can generate interface traps or oxide traps mainly by dissociating the Si-H or Si-O bond, thus affecting device performances such as threshold voltage and saturation current. It is one of the most significant reliability issues for devices and circuits. Particularly, the increase in heat generation per unit volume due to high integration density of advanced integrated circuits leads to a severe self-heating effect (SHE) of nanoscale field effect transistors (FETs), and low thermal conductivity of materials in nanoscale FETs further aggravates the SHE. High temperature improves the HCI reliability in the conventional MOSFET with long channels in which the energy of carriers can be relaxed. However, high temperature due to severe SHE deteriorates HCI reliability in nanoscale FETs, which is a big concern in device and circuit design. In this paper, the modeling and simulation methods of HCI in FETs are reviewed. Particularly, some recently proposed HCI models with consideration of the SHE are reviewed and discussed in detail.