Submicrometer MOSFETs may suffer from reliability degradation, which has a strong correlation with substrate current. In order to know what is happening to substrate current in a VLSI environment, a substrate-current circuit simulator is developed. The simulator is applied to MOS unit circuit blocks, VLSI static memories, and dynamic memories, and their hot-carrier duty ratios are calculated. A new circuit technology, called normally-on enhancement MOSFET insertion (NOEMI), is proposed which can suppress hot-carrier generation. Several design implications for submicrometer VLSIs are obtained through the analysis.
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Sakurai et al. (1986) studied this question.