Effect of technology scaling on the 1/f noise of deep submicron PMOS transistors

A thorough investigation of technology scaling on the 1/f noise characteristics of pMOSFETs from four advanced CMOS technologies with dual gate oxide thickness is reported for the first time. The results show that the current spectral noise density S-Id of thin gate oxide transistors increases by approximately 1-2 orders of magnitude when scaling from 350 to 130 nm. This increase can be attributed to the changeover from thermal oxides to nitrided oxides from 250 nm and below. The magnitude of increase is influenced by the degree of nitridation. In comparison with the thin gate oxide non-nitrided transistors from the 350 nm node, nitridation has increased the S-Id of architecturally equivalent thick gate oxide transistors from the 250 nm to 130 nm nodes by a maximum of an order of magnitude. The experimentally observed 1/f noise trends correlate well with the BSIM3v3 flicker noise model. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.