In the area of physics and technology, focus of the work has largely been on the study of degradation of MOS devices, and the development of new materials and processes for ameliorating their effects. The degradation effects studied include radiation effects, hot-carrier effects, high-field stressing, oxide breakdown, ESD, and NBTI. We have developed a rad-hard MOS technology going upto 1 Mrad(Si) for ionizing and neutron radiations. This technology was initially developed using MOS capacitors as the vehicle, but finally proved with MOS gate-array based circuits fabricated in our laboratory.

     We have extensively studied new types of oxides, especially oxynitrides and nitrides, in the range of 2-300 nm. This includes a study of growth kinetics, and optimization of growth conditions, as well as detailed characterization of defects in these oxides and
mechanisms of defect generation under radiation, hot-carrier stressing, and high-field stressing. We have also looked in detail at breakdown characteristics of gate oxides, including various aspects of time dependent dielectric breakdown. Recent interests include the time dependent dielectric breakdown, study of high-k insulators for gate dielectrics, NBTI studies in oxynitrides etc.