Improved hot-electron reliability in strained-Si nMOS

Strained-Si/relaxed-Si/sub 1-x/Ge/sub x/ structures provide a viable means of improving CMOS performance. For nMOS devices, the tensile strain in pseudomorphic Si on relaxed-Si/sub 1-x/Ge/sub x/ splits the six-fold degeneracy of the conduction band minimum, rendering increased electron mobility due to a lower in-plane effective mass and reduced intervalley scattering. In this paper, in addition to confirming enhanced performance for biaxial-strained-Si nMOS, we present hot-electron degradation characteristics for the first time, showing improvement over bulk Si.