On the properties of the gate and substrate current after soft breakdown in ultrathin oxide layers

On the data interpretation of the C-AFM measurements in the characterization of thin insulating layers

“…At low voltage, the trap is deactivated and the following forward curve coincide with the first one. As the creation of a trap is nothing else that the creation of a local 0.01 conduction path, this view is consistent with the macroscopic results of F. Crupi, who observed random telegraph signal after soft breakdown of an ultrathin oxide [14].…”

On the scaling issues and high-κ replacement of ultrathin gate dielectrics for nanoscale MOS transistors

“…New electronic reliability challenges in the gate dielectric materials have come across with the ultrathin gate oxide demands [52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62]. For example, the retention time requirement for a non-volatile FLASH memory device is generally over 10 years.…”

Carrier separation measurement of leakage current under prebreakdown in ultrathin SiO2 films

“…for soft breakdown, which is low-damage destructive breakdown. 3,[9][10][11][12][13][14] This is not self-evident because the leakage current after soft breakdown is larger than that under PreBD by several orders of magnitude, and, above all, the leakage path formed by soft breakdown never annihilates with additional stress. Howerver, both sets of data show surprising similarity in that the leakage current changes from being dominated by hole-related leakage to primarily electron tunneling leakage with increasing gate bias.…”