Negative-bias temperature instability

Negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) is a key reliability issue in MOSFETs. NBTI manifests as an increase in the threshold voltage and consequent decrease in drain current and transconductance of a MOSFET. The degradation is often approximated by a power-law dependence on time. It is of immediate concern in p-channel MOS devices (pMOS), since they almost always operate with negative gate-to-source voltage; however, the very same mechanism also affects nMOS transistors when biased in the accumulation regime, i.e. with a negative bias applied to the gate. More specifically, over time positive charges become trapped at the oxide-semiconductor boundary underneath the gate of a MOSFET. These positive charges partially cancel the negative gate voltage without contributing to conduction through the channel as electron holes in the semiconductor are supposed to. When the gate voltage is removed, the trapped charges dissipate over a time scale of milliseconds to hours. The problem has become more acute as transistors have shrunk, as there is less averaging of the effect over a large gate area. Thus, different transistors experience different amounts of NBTI, defeating standard circuit design techniques for tolerating manufacturing variability which depend on the close matching of adjacent transistors. NBTI has become significant for portable electronics because it interacts badly with two common power-saving techniques: reduced operating voltages and clock gating. With lower operating voltages, the NBTI-induced threshold voltage change is a larger fraction of the logic voltage and disrupts operations. When a clock is gated off, transistors stop switching and NBTI effects accumulate much more rapidly. When the clock is re-enabled, the transistor thresholds have changed and the circuit may not operate. Some low-power designs switch to a low-frequency clock rather than stopping completely in order to mitigate NBTI effects. The details of the mechanisms of NBTI have been debated, but two effects are believed to contribute: trapping of positively charged holes, and generation of interface states.