Experimental study of threshold voltage fluctuation due to statistical variation of channel dopant number in MOSFET's

Abstract

Threshold voltage fluctuation has been experimentally studied, using a newly developed test structure utilizing an 8 k-NMOSFET array. It has been experimentally shown that both V/sub th/ and the channel dopant number n/sub a/ distributions are given as the Gaussian function, and verified that the standard deviation of n/sub a/, can be expressed as the square root of the average of n/sub a/, which is consistent with statistics. In this study, it has been shown that V/sub th/ fluctuation (/spl delta/V/sub th/) is mainly caused by the statistical fluctuation of the channel dopant number which explains about 60% of the experimental results. Moreover, we discuss briefly a new scaling scenario, based on the experimental results of the channel length, the gate oxide thickness, and the channel dopant dependence of /spl delta/V/sub th/. Finally, we discuss V/sub th/ fluctuation caused by the independent statistical-variations of two different dopant atoms in the counter ion implantation process.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>