A dynamic noise measurement technique used to estimate activation energies for failure mechanisms of a transistor

Abstract The concentional MTF tests used to evaluate the activation energies A E for failure mechanisms of a transistor is time consuming and expensive. In this paper, a dynamic noise measurement technique has been developed. Under step accelerated thermal stress condition, both LF noise levels of a transistor before and during ageing are used to evaluate the activation energes A E . This new approach has advantages in requiring less time and evaluating the activation energies of each device individually. Next, we suggest that this dynamic noise measurement technique can be used to improve conventional noise criteria used in previous works [10]–[13] , the theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that using both the initial niose before ageing and the noise variation after the first step of ageing, the reliability estimation are more correct and effective.