Investigation of temperature acceleration of thin oxide time-to-breakdown

Abstract We study the effect of elevated temperature on the thin oxide breakdown. We find that the Arrhenius law does not describe the process well—in contrast to that we observe the log of the time-to-breakdown to scale linearly with temperature for a wide range of oxide thicknesses. We further observe that both the hole fluence and the neutral electron trap density at breakdown decrease at increased temperatures and do not reach constant critical values. We also show how elevated temperature affects the reliability of oxide films and predict insufficient reliability for oxides below 2.5–2.8 nm.