The Capture/Emission Time Map Approach to the Bias Temperature Instability

Recent results suggest that the bias temperature instability can in good approximation be understood as the collective response of an ensemble of independent defects. Although the kinetics of charge capture and defect creation clearly require the presence of charge carriers in the channel, they appear reaction rather than diffusion limited. While a number of peculiar features in these kinetics have been revealed recently, the most striking feature remains the wide distribution of reaction rates, or equivalently, time constants. By modeling the activation energies of the time constants via bivariate Gaussian distributions in what we call capture/emission time maps, a wide range of experimentally observed features can be explained in closed analytical form. Examples are the temperatureand bias-independent power-law time exponent during stress including saturation at longer times, the long logarithmic-like recovery traces, as well as differences and similarities between DC and AC stress.