Humidity Penetration Impact on Integrated Circuit Performance and Reliability

In this paper, we study the impact of humidity penetration into ICs (i.e., 14 nm SOI digital ring oscillators and 22 nm SOI mixed-signal LC-tank voltage-controlled oscillators) using controlled breaches of the chip barrier. Based on data collected from more than 460 samples, we found that the humidity penetration causes the performance of the circuit to be reduced (1-3%) because of the BEOL capacitance increase, while no detectable impact on the overall circuit lifetime is observed because of FEOL BTI and GOX mechanisms dominance.