Effects of Plasma Damage on Metal-insulator-Metal Capacitors and Transistors for Advanced Mixed-Signal/Radio-Frequency Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor Technology

Abstract

The effects of damage on mixed-signal (MS)/radio-frequency (RF) circuits integrated with metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors and advanced metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are studied in this work. The impact of damage on an MIM oxide is evaluated by connecting its capacitor top metal (CTM) to an upper-level metal with a large antenna ratio (AR(CTM)) used in an actual CTM circuit connected to an interconnect. In addition to the dielectric degradation of a transistor, we also investigate the damage-enhanced negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) degradation of a transistor with its gate electrode connected to an MIM capacitor with a large ARCTM for various gate oxide thicknesses. A model is proposed to explain the experimentally observed dependence of NBTI degradation on AR(CTM) and accurately simulate failure distributions in the presence of plasma damage. (C) 2009 The Japan Society of Applied Physics