A new analytic model for the description of the intrinsic oxide breakdown statistics of ultra-thin oxides

The degradation of thin gate oxide is described as the continuous generation of electron traps, until a critical electron trap density is reached, corresponding to the formation of a breakdown path. This process is described statistically resulting in an analytic expression of the intrinsic Weibull distribution as a function of trap density. It can be concluded that the slope of the distribution increases with increasing oxide thickness, because an increasing number of traps is required to form the breakdown path. Also, the critical electron trap density increases with oxide thickness because longer paths have a lower probability of being well oriented to cause breakdown. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd