Why hot carrier emission based timing probes will work for 50 nm, 1V CMOS technologies

The intensity of the hot-carrier light emission from advanced CMOS technologies will not decrease significantly below present levels in the next several years even as operating voltages approach 1 V. Hot-luminescence techniques for circuit characterization such as PICA will remain viable over this period. The effect on the emission intensity of the decreasing operating voltages and device dimensions is dominated by the dependence of the hot-carrier distribution on voltage. Calculations of hot-electron distribution functions for small nFETs including Coulomb scattering from the source and drain show that the distribution functions for energies greater than 1 eV will only decrease slightly as operating voltages scale to below 1V. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.