Generalized Successive Failure Methodology for Non-Weibull Distributions and Its Applications to SiO2 or High-k/SiO2 Bilayer Dielectrics and Extrinsic Failure Mode

We report a generalized successive failure (or breakdown) methodology for non-Weibull distributions and successfully apply it to both SiO2 single-layer dielectric with progressive BD and high-kappa/SiO2 bilayer dielectrics in intrinsic failure mode. We show that for failure-current based distributions (non-Weibull) of intrinsic mode with a steeper slope at low percentiles, the most significant lifetime margin comes from this steeper slope itself and not from the tolerance to several failure events. On the other hand, the application of successive failure methodology to extrinsic failure mode with shallow slopes commonly observed in real life of products can lead to very large TDDB reliability margin if failure correction schemes such as error correction code can be implemented.