
48 Semiconductors: Integrated Circuit Design for Manufacturability
The typical, 10-year gate oxide integrity (GOI) lifetime criterion for active
devices is to ensure that no carriers can penetrate the oxide in numbers large
enough to cause wearout, for the specied power supply voltage and operat-
ing time, even if the carriers permitted to enter the dielectric are deliberately
going to change its charge state (e.g., program the memory). Oxide defects
due to charge trapping are caused by:
• insulating nature of the dielectric resulting in uncompensated charge
centers, which may later decay to neutralized structural defects
• carriers moving across ...