Hot Carrier Degradation-Induced Dynamic Variability in FinFETs: Experiments and Modeling

In this article, the dynamic variability induced by hot carrier degradation (HCD) in FinFETs is studied with decomposing the variation contributions of multiple types of traps. The nonlinear relationship of μ-σ2(ΔVth) are newly observed in both n- and p-type FinFETs. A multi-trap-based HCD variation model is proposed and verified in FinFETs. The impacts of HCD variations on the static random-access memory (SRAM) read/write stability are also demonstrated with the circuit simulation. The results are beneficial for the reliability-aware circuit design against HCD variability particularly for FinFET-based circuits.