Hot Carrier Design Considerations for MOS Devices and Circuits

As device dimensions decrease, hot-carrier effects, which are due mainly to the presence of a high electric field inside the device, are becoming a major design concern. On the one hand, the detrimental effects-such as transconductance degradation and threshold shift-need to be minimized or, if possible, avoided altogether. On the other hand, performance­ such as the programming efficiency of nonvolatile memories or the carrier velocity inside the devices-need to be maintained or improved t...