These hot carriers that have sufficiently high energies and momenta to allow them to be injected from the semiconductor into the surrounding dielectric films such as the gate and sidewall oxides as well as the buried oxide in the case of silicon on insulator ( SOI ) MOSFETs.
22.
Leveraging this success, additional physics-of-failure based algorithms have been derived for the three other major degradation mechanisms ( time dependent dielectric breakdown [ TDDB ], hot carrier injection [ HCI ], and negative bias temperature instability [ NBTI ] ) in modern integrated circuits ( equations shown below ).
23.
As a result, internal electric fields increase in aggressively scaled MOSFETs, which comes with the additional benefit of increased carrier velocities ( up to velocity saturation ), and hence increased switching speed, but also presents a major reliability problem for the long term operation of these devices, as high fields induce hot carrier injection which affects device reliability.
