Dans la chaine de développement des circuits, une attention particulière doit être portée sur le comportement en fiabilité des dispositifs MOS comme briques de base des circuits avancés CMOS lors du développement d’une technologie. Au niveau du dispositif, les comportements des différents mécanismes de dégradation sont caractérisés. A l’opposé dans le prototype final, le produit est caractérisé dans des conditions accélérées de vieillissement, mais seuls des paramètres macroscopiques peuvent être extraits. Un des objectifs de cette thèse a été de faire le lien entre le comportement en fiabilité d’un circuit ou système et ses briques élémentaires. Le second point important a consisté à développer des solutions de tests dites ‘intelligentes’ afin d’améliorer la testabilité et le gain de place des structures, pour mettre en évidence le suivi du vieillissement des circuits et la compensation des dégradations. Une autre famille de solutions a consisté à reproduire directement dans la structure l’excitation ou la configuration réelle vue par les dispositifs ou circuits élémentaires lors de leur vie d’utilisation (lab in situ). / In the circuit development, specific attention must be paid to the MOS device reliability as a building block as well as a prototype reference circuit (CMOS) during the technology development. At device level, the different degradation mechanisms are characterized. In the final prototype, the product is characterized in accelerated aging conditions, but only the macroscopic parameters can be extracted. One objective of this thesis has been to link the circuit or system reliability and its building blocks. Also, the second important point has consisted in the development of 'smart' test solutions to improve testability and gain up structures so as to highlight the circuits aging monitoring and degradation compensation. Another family of ‘smart’ solutions has involved reproducing directly in the structure the excitement or the actual configuration as it is seen by elementary circuits or devices during their usage life (lab in situ).

In the modern semiconductor world, there is a significant scaling of the transistor dimensions--The transistor gate length and the gate oxide thickness drop down to only several nanometers. Today the semiconductor industry is already dominated by submicron devices and other material devices for the high transistor density and performance enhancement. In this case, the semiconductor reliability issues are the most important thing for commercialization. The major reliability issues caused by voltage are hot carrier effects (HCs) and gate oxide breakdown (BD) effects. These issues are recently more important to industry, due to the small size and high lateral field in short-channel of the device will cause high electrical field and other reliability issues. This dissertation primarily focuses on the study of the CMOS device gate oxide breakdown effect on different kinds of circuits performance, also some HC effects on circuit's performance are studied. The physical mechanisms for BD have been presented. A practical and accurate equivalent breakdown circuit model for the CMOS device was studied to simulate the RF performance degradation on the circuit level. The BD location effect has been evaluated. Furthermore, a methodology was developed to predict the BD effects on the circuit's performances with different kinds of BD location. It also provides guidance for the reliability considerations of the digital, analog, and RF circuit design. The BD effects on digital circuits SRAM, analog circuits Sample&Hold, and RF building blocks with the nanoscale device--low noise amplifier, LC oscillator, mixer, and power amplifier, have been investigated systematically. Finally 90 nm device will be used to study the HC effect on the circuit's performance. The contributions of this dissertation include: Providing a thorough study of the gate oxide breakdown issues caused by the voltage stress on the device--from device level to circuit level; Studying real voltage stress case--high frequency (950 MHz) dynamic stress, and comparing with the traditional DC stress; A simple, practical, and analytical method is derived to study the gate oxide breakdown effect including breakdown location effect and soft / hard breakdown on the digital, analog and RF circuits performances. A brief introduction and simulation for 90 nm device HC effect provide some useful information and helpful data for the industry. The gate oxide breakdown effect is the most common device reliability issue. The successful results of this dissertation, from device level to circuit level, provide an insight on how the BD affects the circuit's performance, and also provide some useful data for the circuit designers in their future work.

In the last three decades, the electronic industry has registered a tremendous progress. The continuous and aggressive downsizing of the transistor feature sizes (CMOS scaling) has been the main driver of the astonishing growth and advancement of microelectronic industry. Currently, the CMOS scaling is almost reaching its limits. The gate oxide is now only a few atomic layers thick, and this extremely thin oxide causes a huge leakage current through the oxide. Therefore, a further reduction of the gate oxide thickness is extremely difficult and new materials with higher dielectric constant are being explored. However, the phenomena of oxide breakdown and reliability are still serious issues in these thin oxides. Oxide breakdown exhibits a soft breakdown behavior at low voltages, and this is posing as one of the most crucial reliability issues for scaling of the ultra-thin oxides. In addition, the stress-induced leakage current (SILC) due to oxide has emerged as a scaling problem for the non-volatile memory technologies. In this dissertation, a percolation modeling approach is introduced to study and understand the dramatic changes in the conductivity of a disordered medium. Two different simulation methods of percolative conduction, the site and bond percolation, are studied here. These are used in simulating the post-breakdown conduction inside the oxide. Adopting a Monte-Carlo method, oxide breakdown is modeled using a 2-D percolation theory. The breakdown statistics and post-breakdown characteristics of the oxide are computed using this model. In this work, the effects of different physical parameters, such as dimension and the applied stress are studied. The simulation results show that a thinning of oxide layer and increasing the oxide area result in softening of breakdown. It is observed that the breakdown statistics appear to follow Weibull characteristics. As revealed by simulations, the Weibull slope changes linearly with oxide thickness, while not having a significant change when the area is varied and when the amount of the applied stress is varied. It is shown that the simulation results are well correlated with the experimental data reported in the literature. In this thesis, studying the conduction through the oxide using percolation model, it was discovered that a critical or a quasi-critical phenomenon occurs depending on the oxide dimensions. The criticality of the phase-transition results in a hard breakdown while the soft breakdown occurs due to a quasi-critical nature of percolation for ultra-thin oxides. In the later part of the thesis, a quantum percolation model is studied in order to explain and model the stress induced leakage current. It is explained that due to the wave nature of electrons, the SILC can be modeled as a tunneling path through the stressed oxide with the smaller tunneling threshold compared to the virgin oxide. In addition to the percolation model, a Markov chain theory is introduced to simulate the movement of electron as a random walk inside the oxide, and the breakdown is simulated using this random-walk of electron through the accumulated traps inside the oxide. It is shown that the trapping-detrapping of electrons results in an electrical noise in the post-breakdown current having 1/f noise characteristics. Using simulation of a resistor network with Markov theory, the conductance of the oxide is computed. An analytical study of a 2-D site percolation system is conducted using recursive methods and useful closed-form expressions are derived for specialized networks.

In the last three decades, the electronic industry has registered a tremendous progress. The continuous and aggressive downsizing of the transistor feature sizes (CMOS scaling) has been the main driver of the astonishing growth and advancement of microelectronic industry. Currently, the CMOS scaling is almost reaching its limits. The gate oxide is now only a few atomic layers thick, and this extremely thin oxide causes a huge leakage current through the oxide. Therefore, a further reduction of the gate oxide thickness is extremely difficult and new materials with higher dielectric constant are being explored. However, the phenomena of oxide breakdown and reliability are still serious issues in these thin oxides. Oxide breakdown exhibits a soft breakdown behavior at low voltages, and this is posing as one of the most crucial reliability issues for scaling of the ultra-thin oxides. In addition, the stress-induced leakage current (SILC) due to oxide has emerged as a scaling problem for the non-volatile memory technologies. In this dissertation, a percolation modeling approach is introduced to study and understand the dramatic changes in the conductivity of a disordered medium. Two different simulation methods of percolative conduction, the site and bond percolation, are studied here. These are used in simulating the post-breakdown conduction inside the oxide. Adopting a Monte-Carlo method, oxide breakdown is modeled using a 2-D percolation theory. The breakdown statistics and post-breakdown characteristics of the oxide are computed using this model. In this work, the effects of different physical parameters, such as dimension and the applied stress are studied. The simulation results show that a thinning of oxide layer and increasing the oxide area result in softening of breakdown. It is observed that the breakdown statistics appear to follow Weibull characteristics. As revealed by simulations, the Weibull slope changes linearly with oxide thickness, while not having a significant change when the area is varied and when the amount of the applied stress is varied. It is shown that the simulation results are well correlated with the experimental data reported in the literature. In this thesis, studying the conduction through the oxide using percolation model, it was discovered that a critical or a quasi-critical phenomenon occurs depending on the oxide dimensions. The criticality of the phase-transition results in a hard breakdown while the soft breakdown occurs due to a quasi-critical nature of percolation for ultra-thin oxides. In the later part of the thesis, a quantum percolation model is studied in order to explain and model the stress induced leakage current. It is explained that due to the wave nature of electrons, the SILC can be modeled as a tunneling path through the stressed oxide with the smaller tunneling threshold compared to the virgin oxide. In addition to the percolation model, a Markov chain theory is introduced to simulate the movement of electron as a random walk inside the oxide, and the breakdown is simulated using this random-walk of electron through the accumulated traps inside the oxide. It is shown that the trapping-detrapping of electrons results in an electrical noise in the post-breakdown current having 1/f noise characteristics. Using simulation of a resistor network with Markov theory, the conductance of the oxide is computed. An analytical study of a 2-D site percolation system is conducted using recursive methods and useful closed-form expressions are derived for specialized networks.

La progressivité du claquage des oxydes de grille d'épaisseurs inférieures à 20 nm permet d'envisager une prolongation de la durée de vie des circuits. Cet enjeu majeur de la fiabilité contemporaine requiert des modèles adaptés afin de contrôler la variabilité des paramètres induites par le claquage. Après avoir étudié l'impact d'une fuite de courant sur une couche chargée, nous avons mis au point un modèle bas niveau de simulation par éléments finis, capable de reproduire la dérive des paramètres mesurée sur des dispositifs du nœud 45 nm. Des lois empiriques de ces dérives ont été injectées dans un modèle compact du transistor dégradé, simplifié par nos observations originales de la dépolarisation du canal et de la répartition des courants. Finalement nous avons simulé l'impact du claquage sur le fonctionnement de circuits simples et estimés la dérive de leurs paramètres tels que l'augmentation de la consommation due au claquage. / Breakdown (BD) progressivity for oxides thicker than 20nm may allow circuit lifetime extension; for design purpose and reliability questions, it is now very important to include soft BD failure in compact models in order to predict circuit's parameters variability. After studying the impact of current leakage on a charged layer, we set up a low level simulation model, able to reproduce parameters deviation measured on MOSFET from the 45nm node. Empirical laws of parameter's variability due to this degradation have been used to build up a compact model of damaged device. Our observations have allowed several improvements of BD understanding and led to major simplifications in BD compact modelling. Our simulations of small circuits show a good agreement with published measures and allow an estimation of BD impact on circuits, such as circuit's parameters deviation and power consumption increase estimation.