Understanding negative bias temperature instability in the context of hole trapping (Invited Paper)

Hole trapping is often considered a parasitic component clouding the real degradation mechanism that is responsible for the negative bias temperature instability (NBTI). As such, it is often dealt with in a rather sketchy way that lacks physical rigor. We review hole trapping mechanisms that go beyond the conventional elastic tunneling mechanism by including structural relaxation and field effects. Contrary to some previous studies, it is shown that the rich spectrum of experimentally observed features of the most commonly observed defect in amorphous oxides, the E′ center, is consistent with experimental data available for NBTI. In particular, we show that a full model that includes the creation of E′ centers from their neutral oxygen vacancy precursors and their ability to be repeatedly charged and discharged prior to total annealing is consistent with a first stage of degradation. In a second stage, positively charged E′ centers can trigger the depassivation of Pb centers at the Si/ SiO2 interface or KN centers in oxynitrides to create an unpassivated silicon dangling bond. We formulate a complete model and evaluate it against experimental data.