Chapter 2 Recent Trends in Bias Temperature Instability

The paradigm shifts occurring in the past few years in our understanding of BTI are reviewed. Among the most significant ones is the shift from perceiving NBTI in terms of the Reaction-Diffusion model to analyzing BTI with the tools originally developed for describing low-frequency noise. This includes the interpretation of the time, temperature, voltage, and duty cycle dependences of BTI. It is further demonstrated that a wealth of information about defect properties can be obtained from deeply-scaled devices, and that this information can allow projection of variability issues of future deeply downscaled CMOS devices. The chapter is concluded by showing the most promising technological solutions to alleviate both PBTI and NBTI.