Effects of non-fatal electrostatic discharge on the threshold voltage degradation in nano CMOS devices

Dear editor, We have conducted experiments by directly applying trans-mission line pulse(TLP)on MOS devices and revealed that non-fatal electrostatic discharge(ESD)strikes can lead to some long-term reliability issues of the MOS circuits.More interestingly,although gate oxide is considered to be more fragile on an ESD strike and the breakdown voltage of gate oxide is used to define the ESD design window,the non-fatal TLP pulsing on the gate terminal has less effect.Whereas drain TLP strike leads to more pronounced threshold volt-age degradation as a result of hot carrier injection near the drain region.