The understanding on the evolution of stress-induced gate leakage in high-k dielectric metal-oxide-field-effect transistor by random-telegraph-noise measurement

The evolution of gate-current leakage path has been observed and depicted by RTN signals on metal-oxide-silicon field effect transistor with high-k gate dielectric. An experimental method based on gate-current random telegraph noise (I_g-RTN) technique was developed to observe the formation of gate-leakage path for the device under certain electrical stress, such as Bias Temperature Instability. The results show that the evolution of gate-current path consists of three stages. In the beginning, only direct-tunnelling gate current and discrete traps inducing I_g-RTN are observed; in the middle stage, interaction between traps and the percolation paths presents a multi-level gate-current variation, and finally two different patterns of the hard or soft breakdown path can be identified. These observations provide us a better understanding of the gate-leakage and its impact on the device reliability.