Impact of self-heating effect in hot carrier injection modeling

This paper studies the impact of self-heating effects in DC-based Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) modeling in power LDMOS devices. Continuous and large power consumption under the on-state DC stress can result in substantial increase in device temperature, which potentially causes non-negligible error in the HCI modeling. The issue is systematically investigated and verified through various approaches such as comparison of HCI degradation between the devices with different voltage ratings and finger widths, junction temperature estimation with 3D thermal simulation, and pulse-based stress modeling. In addition, it is shown that reliability projection methodology based on the actual circuit waveforms can be more immune to the potential errors caused by the self-heating effect in the conventional DC-based modeling.