Investigation of Interplays between Body Biasing and Hot Carrier Degradation (HCD) in Advanced NMOS FinFETs

The impact of hot carrier degradation (HCD) on the device body bias modulation effect, or the impact of body-biased stress on HCD degradation, has been examined separately in recent studies, which show interesting results. Thus, an in-depth study on the interplay between body biasing and HCD is needed. In this paper, by combining experimental results with TCAD simulations, we reveal that negative body bias stress significantly enhances carrier energy near the bottom of the Fin, consequently exacerbating HCD in nFinFET. Furthermore, with the increase in negative body bias stress, the proportion of traps at the bottom of the Fin gradually increases, consequently weakening the body bias modulation effect. Based on the influence of trap location distribution on body bias modulation, we introduce a novel characterization technique that employs body bias modulation of the threshold voltage to differentiate the distribution of traps within the vertical Fin direction.