Relationship between Plasma Damage, SILC and Gate-Oxide Reliability

The "doom's day curve" from IBM is revisited. The early part of the SILC growth curve is shown to be where the trap generation rate is extracted for scaling limit calculation. The very same part of the curve is also shown to be dominated by latent defects caused by plasma-charging damage. As a result, we conclude that the gate-oxide scaling will not be limited by the intrinsic gate-oxide reliability. Rather, it is limited by plasma damage.