Studies on Joint failure model of negative bias temperature instability and hot carrier degradation

Abstract

In this paper, a unified Joint model of negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) and hot carrier degradation (HCD) is proposed. It is based on the reaction-diffusion theoretical framework for an in-depth study of the mechanism of threshold voltage degradation of transistors under mixed stresses. The model fully considers the coupling effect of NBTI and HCD under actual operating conditions, and systematically describes the common impact of these two failure mechanisms on device performance through physical modeling and mathematical derivation. On this basis, a new circuit-level reliability simulation method combining failure modeling, stress profile extraction, and failure injection techniques is developed, aiming to provide an efficient and accurate solution for IC reliability analysis. With this method, the performance degradation of ring oscillator and SRAM memory circuits is investigated. The simulation results show that the proposed Joint failure model accurately describes the NBTI and HCD processes, which not only has good physical consistency, but also significantly reduces the computation time and complexity, and has a wide application prospect in the reliability assessment of large-scale integrated circuits.