Moore's law Noy77], which predicted that the number of devices in- tegrated on a chip would be doubled every two years, was accurate for a number of years. Only recently has the level of integration be- gun to slow down somewhat due to the physical limits of integration technology. Advances in silicon technology have allowed Ie design- ers to integrate more than a few million transistors on a chip; even a whole system of moderate complexity can now be implemented on a single chip. To keep pace with the increasing complexity in very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuits, the productivity of...

As the complexity and the density of VLSI chips increase with shrinking design rules, the evaluation of long-term reliability of MOS VLSI circuits is becoming an important problem. The assessment and improvement of reliability on the circuit level should be based on both the failure mode analysis and the basic understanding of the physical failure mechanisms observed in integrated circuits. Hot-carrier induced degrada- tion of MOS transistor characteristics is one of the primary mechanisms affecting the long-term reliability of MOS VLSI circuits. It is likely to become even more important in...