Post-breakdown oxide voltage oscillation in thin SiO ₂ under nano-scaled repetitive ramped voltage stress

Improvement in the Cumulative Failure Distribution of High-kDielectric Subjected to Nanoscale Stress by D2Post-Deposition Annealing

“…1,2) This area is several orders of magnitude smaller than that of MOS capacitors on which the conventional breakdown measurements were made. Hence, it is believed that the degradation and breakdown of thin dielectrics should be observed by scanning probe microscopy based tools [3][4][5][6][7] because the area of the probe tip is in the same order of magnitude as the breakdown spot. At the same time it has been shown that annealing, typically in a pure N 2 environment and performed directly after the oxide deposition, has a tremendous effect on the reliability of high-k dielectrics.…”