IN ADDITION TO SHARED INTERNET ACCESS FOR PCS, THE HOME NETWORK WILL CONNECT TO EVERY CONSUMER ELECTRONIC DEVICE. TO MAKE THIS POSSIBLE, WE MUST CONSIDER ROBUST SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS, HOME

We live in an age of ever-accelerating technological change. The signal event at the end of the second millennium was almost certainly the explosion of the Internet. In 1995 there were 20 million Internet users; by 1998 there were 160 million. We could have 500 million users worldwide by 2003, with over 14 countries having more than 40 % of their population online. Those 14 countries represent more than half of the world’s GDP (gross domestic product). Internet-based commerce has grown from essentially zero in 1995 to $50 billion in 1998, and industry observers expect it to reach$1,300 billion by 2003. There is an unprecedente

MIMC reliability and electrical behavior defined by a physical layer property of the dielectric

Metal-insulator-metal capacitor (MIMC) reliability and electrical properties are defined by the TDDB lifetime. breakdown voltage and leakage current. In this article, the correlation is determined between these electrical properties and the physical and chemical properties of the SiN dielectric layer. It is demonstrated how a SiN dielectrics with a high refractive index have high Si content and show an increased initial leakage Current. However, contradictory to the high leakage current, these dielectrics also show high lifetimes. It is shown that SiN dielectrics with a high Si content contain high numbers of charge trapping centers. Over time, a high concentration of trapped charges is build up to such an extend that the local electric field over the dielectric is significantly decreased. This results in the observed reliability improvement of the dielectric. The final intrinsic quality and reliability of MIMC capacitors can therefore be determined by Measurable physical properties of the MIMC dielectric at the time of the deposition of this layer. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved