Energy loss to bound hydrogen at the Si surface

The degradation of Si VLSI circuits has been a continuing topic of considerable interest for many years. It was at first thought that the basic 3.1 eV required to lift a carrier from the Si conduction band into the SiO₂ insulator would be a limit that could be passed by reductions in the operating voltages. This has proved not to be the case. More recently, it has been proposed that electron-electron scattering between carriers in the channel of the device could lead to charge injection and subsequent degradation. In an accompanying paper, we show that this effect is rather small. Recently, we have predicted a new, low voltage process in which hydrogen bonded at the Si interface can be transferred to an anti-bonding site in the Si lattice with the absorption of only 1.2 eV. In this paper, we examine the scattering rate for a hot carrier to lose an energy hω to a bound particle. In this case, the momentum exchange is primarily two dimensional, so that the quasi-two-dimensional nature of the carriers in the inversion layer becomes important.