Abstract
Nanometer scale variations in property of polycrystalline high-K (HK) dielectrics significantly affect the reliability and performance of HK-based metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices. Electrical and physical insight into the kinetics and variability in degradation and breakdown trends of dielectrics is essential to understand the physics and stochastics of failure in transistors. This study will in turn help to understand charge trapping mechanisms in Flash memory and filamentary resistive switching in RRAM. In this work, we present a study on impact of local variations of HK dielectric properties on its degradation, breakdown and recovery process using a combination of Monte Carlo simulations and experimental results with nanometer scale resolution.