Numerical confirmation of inelastic trap-assisted tunneling (ITAT) as SILC mechanism

This paper presents a quite comprehensive procedure covering both the stress-induced leakage current (SILC) and oxide breakdown, achieved by balancing systematically the modeling and experimental works. The underlying model as quoted in the literature features three key parameters: the tunneling relaxation time τ, the neutral electron trap density N_t, and the trap energy level E_t. First of all, 7-nm thick oxide MOS devices with wide range oxide areas are throughly characterized in terms of the optically induced trap filling, the charge-to-breakdown statistics, the gate voltage developments with the time, and the SILC I-V. The former three are involved together with a percolation oxide breakdown model to build N_t explicitly as function of the stress electron fluence. Then the overall tunneling probability is calculated with which a best fitting to SILC I-V furnishes τ of 4.0 × 10^-13 s and E_t of 3.4 eV. The extracted τ is found to match exactly that extrapolated from existing data. Such striking consistencies thereby provide evidence that inelastic trap-assisted tunneling (ITAT) is indeed the SILC mechanism. Differences and similarities of the involved physical parameters between different studies are compared as well.