The intensity in the near infrared of the hot-carrier light emission from advanced
CMOS technologies will not decrease significantly below present levels in the next several years
even as operating voltages approach 1V. This means that hot-luminescence techniques for circuit
characterization such as PICA will remain viable over this period. The effect on the emission
intensity of the decreasing operating voltages and device dimensions is dominated by the
dependence of the hot-carrier distribution on voltage. Calculations of hot-electron distribution
functions for small nFETs including Coulomb scattering from the heavily-doped source and
drain show that the distribution functions for energies greater than 1 eV will only decrease
slightly as devices scale from the present 1.8V technology to below 1V.
By: J. C. Tsang, J. A. Kash, and M. V. Fischetti
Published in: RC22072 in 2001
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