Silicon on Insulator is more than a technology, more than a job, and more than a venture in microelectronics; it is something different and refreshing in device physics. This book recalls the activity and enthu siasm of our SOl groups. Many contributing students have since then disappeared from the SOl horizon. Some of them believed that SOl was the great love of their scientific lives; others just considered SOl as a fantastic LEGO game for adults. We thank them all for kindly letting us imagine that we were guiding them. This book was very necessary to many people. SOl engineers will certainly be happy: indeed, if the performance of their SOl components is not always outstanding, they can now safely incriminate the relations given in the book rather than their process. Martine, Gunter, and Y. S. Chang can contemplate at last the amount of work they did with the figures. Our SOl accomplices already know how much we borrowed from their expertise and would find it indecent to have their detailed contri butions listed. Jean-Pierre and Dimitris incited the book, while sharing their experience in the reliability of floating bodies. Our families and friends now realize the SOl capability of dielectrically isolating us for about two years in a BOX. Our kids encouraged us to start writing. Our wives definitely gave us the courage to stop writing. They had a hard time fighting the symptoms of a rapidly developing SOl allergy.

As device dimensions decrease, hot-carrier effects, which are due mainly to the presence of a high electric field inside the device, are becoming a major design concern. On the one hand, the detrimental effects-such as transconductance degradation and threshold shift-need to be minimized or, if possible, avoided altogether. On the other hand, performance such as the programming efficiency of nonvolatile memories or the carrier velocity inside the devices-need to be maintained or improved through the use of submicron technologies, even in the presence of a reduced power supply. As a result, one of the major challenges facing MOS design engineers today is to harness the hot-carrier effects so that, without sacrificing product performance, degradation can be kept to a minimum and a reli able design obtained. To accomplish this, the physical mechanisms re sponsible for the degradations should first be experimentally identified and characterized. With adequate models thus obtained, steps can be taken to optimize the design, so that an adequate level of quality assur ance in device or circuit performance can be achieved. This book ad dresses these hot-carrier design issues for MOS devices and circuits, and is used primarily as a professional guide for process development engi neers, device engineers, and circuit designers who are interested in the latest developments in hot-carrier degradation modeling and hot-carrier reliability design techniques. It may also be considered as a reference book for graduate students who have some research interests in this excit ing, yet sometime controversial, field.

The exploding number of uses for ultrafast, ultrasmall integrated circuits has increased the importance of hot-carrier effects in manufacturing as well as for other technological applications. They are rapidly movingout of the research lab and into the real world. This book is derived from Dr. Takedas book in Japanese, Hot-Carrier Effects, (published in 1987 by Nikkei Business Publishers). However, the new book is much more than a translation. Takedas original work was a starting point for developing this much more complete and fundamental text on this increasingly important topic. The new work encompasses not only all the latest research and discoveries made in the fast-paced area of hot carriers, but also includes the basics of MOS devices, and the practical considerations related to hot carriers. Chapter one itself is a comprehensive review of MOS device physics which allows a reader with little background in MOS devices to pick up a sufficient amount of information to be able to follow the rest of the book The book is written to allow the reader to learn about MOS Device Reliability in a relatively short amount of time, making the texts detailed treatment of hot-carrier effects especially useful and instructive to both researchers and others with varyingamounts of experience in the field The logical organization of the book begins by discussing known principles, then progresses to empirical information and, finally, to practical solutions Provides the most complete review of device degradation mechanisms as well as drain engineering methods Contains the most extensive reference list on the subject