United States

The root causes for the anomalous Pf-tf scaling behavior in the adiabatic regime are identified for a BiCMOS-based ESD protection for the first time. TCAD is used both to understand the turn-on of the integrated architecture with two coupled bipolar transistors under different ESD pulses and to explore the main physical mechanisms leading to the thermal runaway and failure. Simulations clearly show the complex interaction between the conductance modulation and the onset of hot spots in the full volume of the device structure, leading to the identification of critical parameters for the optimization of the proposed ESD cell.

IRPS 2022 Main Conference 

TCAD investigation of Power-to-Failure evaluation for ultrafast events in BJT-based ESD protection cells

ultrafast stimuli

tcad

#### Welcome to the 60th IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS)!

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**General Chair Welcome Message**

Welcome to IRPS 2022! When the IRPS Management Committee began making plans for Dallas, we recognized the strong desire by the reliability physics community to return to a face-to-face symposium that we last had in Monterey in 2019. But as time progressed, we recognized that travel restrictions were not being lifted as rapidly as we anticipated. Rather than leave out those of you who could not attend in person, we adopted a hybrid format allowing for both remote attendance and remote presentations. This is a first for IRPS and I am confident it will be a success for all.

With this new hybrid format, the symposium will return to the original five-day format with Tutorials and Year in Review on the first two days. The Technical Program, Keynote Talks, Workshops and Poster session will be held on the following three days. All of these (except Workshops and Posters) will be available via real-time streaming in the US Central Time zone with virtual attendees having Q&A access to the presenters. For those virtual attendees who cannot watch the live presentations, the material will be available on demand to all attendees for a month after the symposium with the ability to communicate with the authors.

In 2020, we were planning on co-hosting the International ESD Workshop (IEW) ESD workshop when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. For 2022, IEW will be seamlessly embedded into the IRPS Program and will sponsor three tutorials, an invited talk, two technical sessions and two evening workshops focused on ESD and latch-up. And we continue our
collaboration with our sister conference, European Symposium on Reliability of Electron Devices Failure Physics and Analysis (ESREF) by hosting their Best Paper and the International Integrated Reliability Workshop (IIRW) by hosting their Best Student Paper.

Our primary objective is to maintain the symposium’s leadership role in the reliability physics of microelectronic devices by attracting leading researchers to present their work and providing attendees the best place to access this information. With all the buzz in the media about whether Moore’s Law has hit its limit, IRPS has been promoting expertise developed in silicon-based reliability over the past sixty years and expanding into new material areas. This year, eight of the technical sessions are devoted to reliability in topics outside of traditional silicon, including wide bandgap GaN/SiC, emerging memory and neuromorphic computing. I hope our ability to draw these communities together will accelerate the cross-fertilization of ideas. 

The Technical Program consists of four keynote speakers, twenty-three invited speakers and eighty-seven oral presentations organized in thirty technical sessions on eighteen reliability topics. Over two evenings, there will be ten Workshops and sixty-six Poster presentations that are designed to allow in person attendees and experts to interact
with one another. With eighteen tutorials covering topics ranging from fundamental transistor and memory reliability all the way up to automotive and complex system-level reliability, this year’s symposium provides an excellent learning opportunity for engineers and scientists new to reliability as well as experienced individuals wanting to explore new
areas. The Year in Review, which serves as a summary of research in the past year, will cover 3D packaging, emerging memory and aging aware circuit designs.

Finally, I would like to express my extreme gratitude to our patrons and exhibitors, whose support makes IRPS possible.
And to all of you, our in person and virtual attendees, for supporting this symposium for sixty years!

**Charles W. Slayman, General Chair** 
**of 2022 IRPS Management Committee**
 
**About IRPS**

The IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) is the premiere conference for engineers and scientists to present new and original work in the area of microelectronics reliability. Drawing participants from the United States, Europe, Asia, and all parts of the world, IRPS seeks to understand the reliability of semiconductor devices, integrated circuits, and microelectronic assemblies through an improved understanding of both the physics of failure as well as the application environment. IRPS provides numerous opportunities for attendees to increase their knowledge and understanding of all aspects of microelectronics reliability, and to meet and network with reliability colleagues from around the world.

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IRPS provides numerous opportunities for attendees to increase their knowledge and understanding of all aspects of microelectronics reliability. It is also an outstanding chance to meet and network with reliability colleagues from around the world.

technical paper

At the 7-nm bulk FinFET node, latchup effects are seen as limited current increases. In this work, 7-nm node latchup susceptibility is evaluated for terrestrial and space environments as a function of supply voltage, temperature, and particle LET. Holding voltage for latchups is strongly dependent on temperature and was observed to be within 100 mV of nominal supply voltage, therefore latchup can be sustained at elevated supply voltages. Latchup SE cross-section increases with increasing particle LET, increasing supply voltage, and increasing temperature. 

Latchup Vulnerability at the 7-nm FinFET Node

This work presents a high-voltage-tolerant (HVT) supply clamp for ESD protection, in which the current drive of the clamp during an ESD event is maximized without compromising reliability during normal operation. Similar to prior HVT clamps, ESD current shunting is provided by 3 cascoded NFETs; however, the trigger circuit is improved. The design is implemented in a 45-nm SOI CMOS technology and the clamp devices are sized for a 2-kV HBM protection level. As evidenced by TLP and VFTLP measurements, the new clamp offers 50% reduction of on-resistance and 0.6 V lower turn-on voltage, relative to the prior art.

A High Voltage Tolerant Supply Clamp for ESD Protection in a 45-nm SOI Technology

Forksheet (FS) FETs are a novel transistor architecture consisting of vertically stacked nFET and pFET sheets at opposite sides of a dielectric wall. The wall allows reducing the p- to nFET separation (p-to-n separation), thus enabling further logic cell area scaling without requiring gate length scaling. We report hot-carrier degradation (HCD) simulations of FS FETs and compare this architecture to nanowire (NW) and nanosheet (NS) FETs. HCD is shown to decrease with increasing sheet width in both NS and FS FETs when taking interface state generation into account. Considering that a FS FET can be made wider than an NS FET because of the reduced p-to-n separation, lower HCD for the FS FET is observed. Finally, we make an initial assessment of the impact of oxide defect charging in the FS wall. We confirm decreasing influence of fixed wall charge for increasing sheet widths and estimate that the overall impact of wall charging will stay under control at operating conditions.

Simulation Comparison of Hot-Carrier Degradation in Nanowire, Nanosheet and Forksheet FETs

We extend our framework for hot-carrier degradation (HCD) modeling by covering the impact of self-heating (SH), which has three main aspects: (i) perturbation of carrier transport, (ii) acceleration of the thermal contribution to bond breakage, and (iii) and shortening vibrational lifetime of the bond, i.e. reducing the multiple-carrier mechanism rate. We validate the framework against HCD data acquired in nFinFETs and pNWFETs under various stress conditions, analyze the importance of each of the aforementioned aspects, and explain why in n-channel FETs SH slightly inhibits HCD, while in p-channel devices HCD is accelerated by SH.

Understanding and Modeling Opposite Impacts of Self-Heating on Hot-Carrier Degradation in n- and p-channel Transistors

A recent progress of NanoBridge (NB) technology is reviewed for embedded nonvolatile field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and memory (NVM) applications. The NB is a kind type of electrochemical resistive-change device using Cu ion migration from Cu interconnects into electrolyte. The NBs are integrated in a standard Cu-BEOL with keeping a PDK and an appropriate ON-conductance is tuned by programming currents depending on the applications. For a routing switch in the FPGA, two NBs are connected in series and each conductance is tuned to ~1mS to transfer signals and realize 78% area reduction compared with a conventional SRAM-FPGA. For the NVM application, that is tuned to ~0.2mS, which has 150oC over 10years retention with 30% change of the conductance, which is potentially applicable for automobile applications.  

NanoBridge Technology: Nonvolatile FPGA and Memory Applications

In advanced DRAM technology, buried-channel-array transistor (BCAT) will generate additional leakage during long-term read/write operations, leading to retention time reduction. In this work, we designed the accelerated aging test in wafer level and proposed a model for the long-term retention time prediction. By adding into conventional retention time simulation flow, the data of retention time at different operation time can be predicted. It was found that the aging can degrade retention time tail around 13% in 10 years. This work is thus helpful to the refresh scheme development considering aging effect.

New Insight into the Aging Induced Retention Time Degradation of Advanced DRAM Technologies

We present a reliable magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) TDDB model using 40Mb 22FDX® STT-MRAM at sub-PPM failure rate. This model is based on the precise estimation of voltage across MTJ at bit-cell level derived from compact model and design simulations to cover the product level endurance performance from MTJ diameter, resistance-area product, and temperature effects. We discuss the implications of pre/post MTJ switching, circuit variations and write pulse on MRAM endurance. By using design-process-test co-optimization, we show robust MRAM product reliability to meet &gt;1M cycles with solder reflows and path towards achieving &gt;E12 cycles for cache applications.

Extended MTJ TDDB Model, and Improved STT-MRAM Reliability with Reduced Circuit and Process Variabilities

The concept of Abutting source/body and drain/anode junction is studied in detail in high voltage LDMOS-SCR with 2D and 3D TCAD simulations. The SCR turn-on and low current filament formation are strongly influenced by the isolation at the anode and cathode side in LDMOS-SCR. While the anode side isolation impacts the filament-induced failures at low currents, the cathode side isolation has a minor impact. The physical insights are given on the SCR turn-on degradation with abutting and its influence on the filament formation and spreading. The obtained understanding helps to build the ESD robust, self-protected LDMOS-SCRs. 

Effect of Source & Drain Side Abutting on the Low Current Filamentation in LDMOS-SCR Devices

With the growth of high performance computing on many industrial sectors that includes mobile/network and data centers/servers, the need for continued technology scaling and advancements on new process technology have paved ways to manufacture advanced semiconductor products. High-k + Metal gate devices and most recently EUV lithography process have become a key enabler for the 7nm technology nodes and beyond [1]. These technologies are being adopted in the advanced DRAM nodes. DRAM memory uses various devices such as MOSFETs (w/ and w/o HK+MG), cell transistor, cell capacitor, and its reliability has also been considered according to the designed purposes. This paper reviews comprehensive reliability on all types of devices used at each circuit in 15nm DRAM memory. The intrinsic reliability of devices in peripheral regions was guaranteed with systematic wafer-level-reliability evaluation up to product level testing for 1000hrs. The reliability of transistors in core regions was verified using design for reliability, various test structures, and up to an accelerated product level aging test. With the suggested degradation modeling of the capacitor in cell regions, the result on 32GB DIMM field tested for over 1 years shows the best in class reliability results and meets 10yrs of lifetime.

Impact of Transistor Reliability on Memories and Memory Periphery Circuitry

This paper presents a new compact model for ESD diodes named Advance SPICE Model for ESD diodes (ASM-ESD). In addition to the current-voltage (I-V) and the capacitance-voltage (C-V) behaviors of the diode under normal operating conditions, ASM-ESD has capabilities to model a plethora of important effects critical for the ESD applications. Model features include the ability to capture the overshoot effects, ambient temperature effects, self-heating effect, post reverse breakdown resistance, parasitic BJT gain, transient behavior of BJT gain and reverse recovery effects in ESD diodes. ASM-ESD model formulations have a physical basis leading to an intuitive extraction flow. Model comparisons with measurements for DC I-V, C-V, and TLP with pulse widths ranging from 200 ns to 1.2 ns are presented. These results demonstrate model accuracy for a full range of ESD event scenarios. 

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Latchup Vulnerability at the 7-nm FinFET Node

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ASM-ESD: A Comprehensive Physics-based Compact Model for ESD Diodes