Selfheating Induced Variability and Reliability in Advanced Logic Devices and Circuits Nonplanar device structures such as FinFETs are widely used in advanced CMOS technology, the nonplanar structures with confined narrow channel region and the low thermal conductivity of materials will prevent heat dissipation, resulting in a localized lattice temperature rise, named selfheating effect (SHE) 1xe2x80x933. The SHE not only causes transistorsu0027 and circuitsu0027 performance varability and degradation but also exacerbates degradation of transistorsu0027 reliability and leading to the reduction of circuitu0027s lifetime, which becomes a significant challenge to device engineers and circuit designers 4xe2x80x936. Thus, the selfheating effect is one of the important issues in the semiconductor industry. For device optimization and circuit design, it is necessary to capture selfheating induced statistical variability and reliability during circuit operation. Normally, the worstcase analysis for SHE at device and circuit level is used to provide a thermalaware design guide, however, it may cause an inaccurate estimation as selfheating can be different in actual circuit operation.

Reliability and Accelerated Testing of 14nm FinFET Ring Oscillators Accelerated lifetime tests are necessary for reliability evaluation of circuits and systems, but the parameters for choosing the test conditions are often unknown. Furthermore, reliability testing is generally performed on test structures that have different properties than actual circuits and systems, which may create inconsistencies in how circuits and systems work in reality. To combat this problem, we use ring oscillators, which are similar to circuits, based on the 14nm FinFET node as the circuit vehicle to extract wearout data. We explore the effects of testing time, sample size, and number of stages on the ability to detect failures for various test conditions, focusing on frontend time dependent dielectric breakdown, which is one of the most dominant wearout mechanisms.