A detailed study of the gate/drain voltage dependence of RTN in bulk pMOS transistors

Abstract Random Telegraph Noise (RTN) has attracted increasing interest in the last years. This phenomenon introduces variability in the electrical properties of transistors, in particular in deeply-scaled CMOS technologies, which can cause performance degradation in circuits. In this work, the dependence of RTN parameters, namely current jump amplitude and emission and capture time constants, on the bias conditions, both VG and VD, has been studied on a set of devices, with a high granularity in a broad voltage range. The results obtained for the VG dependences corroborate previous works, but suggest a unique trend for all the devices in a VG range that goes from the near-threshold region up to voltages over the nominal operation bias. However, different trends have been observed in the parameters dependence for the case of VD. From the experimental data, the probabilities of occupation of the associated defects have been evaluated, pointing out large device-to-device dispersion in the VD dependences.