Acknowledgment

all the oxides, while the mean lifetime of each oxide presents a trend similar to the one of the charge-to-breakdown. Residual leakage after high field stresses has allowed the determination of the field acceleration factor, whose value was found similar to the one obtained with standard TDDB measurements, indicating that the intrinsic failure modes of these oxides is strictly related to the wear-out characteristics. Charge trapping behavior investigated by constant cur-rent stress, showed the best performance for high-temper-ature nitridation, regardless of the starting oxide technol-ogy, dry or steam. Satisfactory results were also obtained for the high-temperature annealed and the low-tempera-ture nitrided steam oxide. Summarizing all these results and considering the requests on thermal budget reduction, both oxide quality and charge trapping behavior seem to indicate low-tem-perature nitrided steam oxide as a good candidate as a tunnel or gate oxide for the future device generation