Gate oxide reliability under ESD-like pulse stress

The reliability of very thin gate oxide under electrostatic discharge-like pulse stress is investigated. Time-dependent dielectric breakdown of gate oxide with thicknesses ranging from 2.2 to 4.7 nm is characterized down to the nanosecond time regime. The 1/E model best fits the time-to-breakdown data. Self-heating does not need to be incorporated into the time-to-breakdown model. The oxide trap generation rate is a function of the stress pulse-width for nanosecond and microsecond stress pulses.