Charge Pumping at Radio Frequencies: Methodology, Trap Response and Application

Application and Evaluation of the RF Charge-Pumping Technique

“…This indicates that an increasing number of traps is too slow to respond to the CP signal. In [7], we have shown that the decrease of Q cp,max with increasing frequency as seen in Fig. 8 cannot be explained by the classical CP theory, but by a distribution of traps in the oxide.…”

“…the leakage current moving far beyond the ∼1 MHz signals used in conventional CP measurements. The problems due to distortion of these high-frequency signals can, e.g., be solved by designing a complete on-chip pulse generator circuit as in the approach of [5], or by making use of the RF CP technique [6], [7]. In this paper, we will elaborate on the application of the RF CP technique.…”

“…The peak-peak amplitude V pp is set by the power level of the RF source and the base level by the dc biasing. In order to find the appropriate power level, we proposed an easy to use method in [7], which makes use of the frequency-independent tunneling current. This approach, however, is only limited to very specific devices that show a considerable tunneling current but do not suffer from too high voltage levels.…”

Reliability engineering in RF CMOS

“…The problems due to distortion of these high frequency signals can e.g. be solved by designing a complete on chip pulse generator circuit as in the approach of [106] or by making use of the RF CP technique [107,108]. In this section the use of the RF CP technique will be evaluated.…”

Constant shape factor frequency modulated charge pumping (FMCP)

“…Since charge pumping current is directly proportional to charge pumping frequency [1][2][3], a higher frequency results in a larger charge pumping current relative to the gate leakage background. Efforts utilizing this approach have extended charge pumping to very high frequencies [7][8][9][10][11] including GHz sine wave gate voltage waveforms [9,10] and GHz square waves [11]. However, such charge pumping frequencies introduce incomplete trap filling concerns causing an ambiguous decreases in charge per cycle (and hence errors in defect density extraction) [12].…”