Temporal and Dose Kinetics of Tunnel Relaxation of Non-Equilibrium Near-Interfacial Charged Defects in Insulators

This paper is devoted mainly to mathematical aspects of modeling and simulation of tunnel relaxation of non-equilibrium charged oxide traps located at/near the interface insulator - conductive channel, for instance in irradiated MOS devices. The generic form of the tunnel annealing response function was derived from the rate equation for the charged defect buildup and annealing as a linear superposition of the responses of different defects with different time constants. Using this linear response function, a number of important practical problems are analyzed and discussed. Combined tunnel and thermal annealing, the power law temporal relaxation after a single ion strike into the gate oxide, are described in context of a general approach.