Degradation of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) reliability such as the relative transconductance reduction by plasma exposure is evaluated. The linear region peak transconductance (gm) decreases with antenna ratio (exposed antenna area/gate area) due to the plasma-induced Si-SiO2 interface state generation. The Si-SiO2 interface-related gm reduction which is defined as (gm0gm)/gm, where gm0 is the initial value of gm, decreases as the gate oxide thickness decreases. It is also found that the decreasing amount of gm depends on the conduction current from the plasma. The correlation between the (gm0gm)/gm and the plasma-induced reduction of charge-to-breakdown of the gate oxide with a constant current stress (ΔQBD) is observed, and the result shows that the gm reduction of nMOSFET during the plasma process is severe to the plasma-induced damage compared with the gate oxide breakdown.

This letter studies a nesting discrete particle swarm optimizer for multi-solution problems. The algorithm operates in discrete search space and consists of two stages. The first stage is global search in rough lattice points for constructing local sub-regions each of which includes one target solution. The second stage is local search where the algorithm operates in parallel in fine lattice points of local subspaces and tires to find all the approximate solutions within a criterion. We then propose an application to finding multiple fixed points in nonlinear dynamical systems and investigate the algorithm efficiency.