on-State Hot Carrier Degradation in Drain-Extended NMOS Transistors

A close analysis of the universality of OFF-state hot carrier degradation (HCI) in drain-extended transistors suggests that on-state HCI degradation should likewise be universal. In this paper, we confirm this hypothesis through an extensive set of experiments on drain-extended n-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor (DeNMOS) transistors and demonstrate that the underlying mechanism for both OFF- and ON-state degradation are essentially identical (even though the drain current differs by several orders of magnitude for the respective stress bias conditions). We show how this universality of ON- and OFF-state hot carrier degradations allows the use of short-term measurements to predict device lifetime under arbitrary operating conditions.