Impact of Hot Carriers on Track Structure Formation When Modeling Single-Event Effects in FinFETs

Full-band Monte Carlo analysis is utilized to study the formation and evolution of heavy-ion strike charge track characteristics resulting from the transport dynamics of energetic carriers following ionization in 14-/16 nm bulk and silicon on insulator (SOI) FinFETs. The radial energy deposition and charge transport characteristics of energetic carriers are studied in the picosecond regime from 10 eV above the band edge to full thermalization. The motion of the system of energetic carriers is well described by diffusion within hundreds of femtoseconds while rapid energy loss processes and secondary carrier generation are still ongoing. When using typical track parameters used in single-event upset (SEU) simulation, drift-diffusion based TCAD simulations do not reproduce experimental SEU cross sections at the 14-/16 nm node. However, traditional drift-diffusion device simulation tools are shown to produce accurate results for both 14-/16 nm bulk and SOI FinFETs if physically informed initial charge track parameters extracted from the full-band Monte Carlo simulations are used. SOI device simulations exhibit greater sensitivity to variations in track radius compared to bulk devices, which experience delayed, diffusive charge collection from the sub-fin region, which is less closely coupled to the hot carrier transient. These findings indicate that drift-diffusion modeling tools provide accurate results for SEU analysis in scaled FinFET technologies with switching times on the order of 1 ps when incorporating physically informed heavy-ion track parameters.