RF glow-discharge plasmas provide mild energetic ion bombardment of exposed surfaces. The characteristics of a 10 MHz RF glow-discharge Ar plasma are studied by particle-in-cell simulation. The model simulates a spherical plasma device using a one-dimensional plasma model. The code is used to determine the breakdown voltage, Vrf , for a given pd , where p is the gas pressure and d is the plasma...

Original scientific paper In electrical power system, variety of solid, liquid and gaseous materials are used for insulation target to protect the incipient failure inside the high voltage power transformers. The insulation is practically ended when the insulation system has become fragile enough to flourish cracks under the electrical and mechanical stresses to which it is subjected. The elect...

When maintaining quality of a metal-insulator-metal capacitor process, it is important to fully understand the root cause for inferior breakdown of MIM PCM structures. This paper demonstrates a case of early capacitor breakdown and describes our method to identify defects before the destructive test with focus on edge-related failures. This led to understanding root cause and generating necessa...

Lee, Yi-Mu. Breakdown and reliability of CMOS devices with stacked oxide/nitride and oxynitride gate dielectrics prepared by RPECVD. (Under the direction of Professor Gerald Lucovsky) Remote-plasma-enhanced CVD (RPECVD) silicon nitride and silicon oxynitride alloys have been proposed to be the attractive alternatives to replace conventional oxides as the CMOS logic and memory technology node is...

High voltage insulation is loosing its quality during the operation of high voltage machines and generators. Degrading high voltage stator insulation is the main reason for sudden breakdown of stator windings. Partial discharge measurements can reveal a lot of defects in stator windings of high voltage rotating machines with operating voltage more than 3,3kV. Partial discharge monitoring provid...

In this work, we present an original model to explain the accelerated wear-out behavior of irradiated ultra-thin oxides. The model uses a statistical approach to the breakdown occurrences based on a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. By means of our model, we can estimate the number and the time evolution of those damaged regions produced by ion hits that generate breakdown spots during high field...

Deep ultraviolet DUV avalanche photodetectors APDs based on an AlN /n-SiC Schottky diode structure have been demonstrated. The device with a mesa diameter of 100 m exhibits a gain of 1200 at a reverse bias voltage of −250 V or a field of about 3 MV /cm. The cut-off and peak responsivity wavelengths of these APDs were 210 and 200 nm, respectively. This is the highest optical gain and shortest cu...

In this paper, we propose and investigate a schottky tunneling source impact ionization MOSFET (STSIMOS) with enhanced device performance. STS-IMOS has silicide (NiSi) source to lower the breakdown voltage of conventional impact ionization MOS (IMOS). There is cumulative effect of both impact ionization and source induced tunneling for the current gating mechanism of the device. The silicide so...

Compact Marx generators are widely used as portable pulse generator in different industrial applications, where high power pulses with rise times of order of some tens of nanoseconds are needed. For those applications, closing switches with very short delay and jitter times have to be used. Considering the fact that the breakdown of spark gap is a statistical process, the delay times of the clo...

We have investigated time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) in high-voltage AlGaN/GaN MetalInsulator-Semiconductor High Electron Mobility Transistors (MIS-HEMTs) biased in the OFF state. This is an important reliability concern that has been overlooked. Towards this goal, we have developed a novel methodology using ultraviolet light that allows us to separate the permanent effects of dielec...