Impact of technology scaling on thermal behavior of leakage current in sub-quarter micron MOSFETs: perspective of low temperature current testing

The increase in the off-state current for sub-quarter micron CMOS technologies is making conventional IDDQ testing ineffective. Since natural process variation together with low-VTH devices can significantly increase the absolute leakage value and the variation, choosing a single threshold for IDDQ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Microelectronics 2002-11, Vol.33 (11), p.985-994
Main Authors: Semenov, Oleg, Vassighi, Arman, Sachdev, Manoj
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
CMOS technology scaling
Leakage current
Low temperature
ΔIDDQTesting
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Summary:The increase in the off-state current for sub-quarter micron CMOS technologies is making conventional IDDQ testing ineffective. Since natural process variation together with low-VTH devices can significantly increase the absolute leakage value and the variation, choosing a single threshold for IDDQ testing is impractical. One of the potential solutions is the cooling of the chip during current testing. In this paper we analyze the impact of CMOS technology scaling on the thermal behavior of different leakage current mechanisms in n-MOSFETs and estimate the effectiveness of low temperature IDDQ testing. We found that the conventional single threshold low temperature IDDQ testing is not effective for sub-quarter micron CMOS technologies and propose the low temperature ΔIDDQ test method. The difference between pass and fail current limits was estimated more than 200× for 0.13-μm CMOS technology.
ISSN:1879-2391
1879-2391
DOI:10.1016/S0026-2692(02)00071-X