Temperature acceleration of CMOS IC operating life

We carried out the high temperature operating life test (HTOT) of CMOS ICs which include n-channel ROMs which were contaminated deliberately by leaving naked for a long time in the room ambient before moulding and got the bimodal failure distributions consisting of m = 0.3–0.5 and m = 2.6–3.3 parts in the Weibull chart. At the same time, the activation energy of 1.14 eV was obtained for m = 2.6–3.3 parts. In order to make clear the failure mechanism of the latter part, we made the test devices for detecting channel leakage current (abbrev. TEG) and checked the shift of leakage current and life acceleration due to temperature in HTOT. Then we found that leakage currents of TEGs have an incubation time, their activation energy was nearly equal to that of the CMOS ICs above and m = 2.6–3.3 for CMOS ICs were reasonably explained due to the gradient α of the logarithm of the median leakage current to that of time. Also we got a 40 times longer life for the same CMOS ICs coated with Si3N4 film instead of SiO2. And finally, from these data, we could verify the cause of failure in CMOS ICs.