Preface

Together with bias temperature instabilities and time-dependent dielectric breakdown, hot carrier degradation has been at the forefront of critical reliability issues for half a century. In earlier technologies, devices were operated at relatively high voltages in which highly energetic (“hot”) carriers are created in a rather straight forward manner. Using some lucky-electron arguments, where a solitary “lucky” hot carrier is able to cause device degradation, simple yet accurate reliability models could be constructed. In modern scaled technologies, however, the true origin of hot carrier degradation is much more subtle, requiring more detailed knowledge of the multi layered physics of defect creation. A lot of research has been carried out in this field during the last 15 years, triggered significantly by the pioneering work of the group of Karl Hess. During recent years, the rapid introduction of new materials and other technological options has raised a number of new issues and challenges which have to be addressed urgently. While a lot of progress has been made in the understanding of device degradation brought about by hot carriers, the topic is far from being fully understood, in particular when challenges in future technologies must be resolved. As such, I felt that a thorough and comprehensive collection of the state of the art would be a valuable resource for scientists and engineers working on this phenomenon. I have therefore invited leading authors in the field to summarize their current understanding and review the state of the art in greater detail than is possible in regular journal and conference publications. The book is structured in three parts and encompasses characterization, defect/device modeling, technological impact, and circuit/compact modeling aspects. In the opening chapter, McMahon et al. (GlobalFoundries) provide an overview of modeling attempts going beyond the simple lucky-electron picture. They summarize the theoretical foundations and contrast these models to those often used in industry to eventually arrive at a qualification scheme compatible with industrial needs. In the next chapter, Rauch and Guarin (State University of New York/IBM) describe the ground breaking energy-driven hot carrier paradigm,