Ricardo Ascázubi’s research while affiliated with Intel and other places

Hot-carrier degradation in contemporary FinFET transistors by means of ultrafast infrared laser pulses enable the study of the evolution of excited states leading to device degradation. Here, we present results from a time-resolved optical setup where additive populations of hot-carriers are photo-injected. We report the experimental observation of damage-inducing excited states with a lifetime of 170 ± 40 fs.

Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) technology scaling has resulted in a substantial rise in power density within a chip. This leads to thermal nonuniformity across integrated circuits (ICs) impacting electromigration (EM), which occurs due to dislocation of conducting elements of interconnects caused by electron flow. Detecting EM risk by accelerated stress methods is an active area of research. This article describes a technique that uses laser to create concentrated area of high temperature, or hot spot. The high temperature is applied to targeted areas of the specific circuit or intellectual property (IP) block of a product, while the rest of the chip continues to operate at standard conditions. The notable benefit from this technique is the capability to selectively accelerate the stressing (EM) process of an individual IP block, rather than stressing the entire chip uniformly.

We report on radiation-induced soft error rate (SER) improvements in the 14-nm second generation ${hbox{high-}} {rm k} + {hbox{metal}}$ gate bulk tri-gate technology. Upset rates of memory cells, sequential elements, and combinational logic were investigated for terrestrial radiation environments, including thermal and high-energy neutrons, high-energy protons, and alpha-particles. SER improvements up to $sim!! 23times$ with respect to devices manufactured in a 32-nm planar technology are observed. The improvements are particularly pronounced in logic devices, where aggressive fin depopulation combined with scaling of relevant fin parameters results in a $sim!! 8times$ reduction of upset rates relative to the first-generation tri-gate technology.

Pulsed laser irradiation is proposed as a fast turn-around tool to predict the soft error rate (SER) performance in modern process technologies. 32nm planar and 22nm Tri-Gate device-level proton and laser cross section results are presented.