Oxide leakage currents and oxygen deficient silicon

Stress induced leakage currents and time dependent dielectric breakdown are important reliability problems. These problems are not well understood on a fundamental level. Several investigators have recently proposed that oxide defects called E' centers play a dominating role in both of these problems. We present evidence linking the presence of E' centers to oxide leakage currents by showing that increases in the densities of(neutral) oxide E' centers are accompanied by large increases in oxide leakage currents.