Insight Into HCI Reliability on I/O Nitrided Devices

Hot carriers injection (HCI) degradation plays an important role in advanced technologies. We carried out an extensive analysis of this degradation mode on 55nm MOS transistors and showed that for large channel lengths, a stress at $V_{G}=V_{D}$ becomes more critical than at $V_{G}= V_{Gibmax}$ condition. This is imputable to an additional degradation mechanism distributed throughout the channel, which likely appears on nitrided samples.