This paper investigates constant voltage stress (CVS) and ramped voltage stress (RVS) for thermally grown oxides on single crystal and on polycrystalline silicon. CVS is a standard stress for the measurement and prediction of oxide lifetimes. However, RVS has the advantage over CVS of recording the breakdown properties in a very fast time and is, therefore, widely used in industry. The aim of this work is the assessment of a correlation between times to breakdown of RVS and CVS. Times to breakdown of RVS and CVS are compared directly and it has been found that they do not correlate with a simple classical model. An anomaly is reported for thick oxides grown on polycrystalline silicon: greater breakdown voltages are recorded for slow ramps than for fast ramps. It is shown that the times to breakdown which are estimated from RVS are longer than times to breakdown of CVS. The increase in times is dependent on the oxide thickness. This is verified with CVS measurements on pre-stressed oxides. In contradiction to the literature, results from pre-stressed oxides were found to have greater time to breakdown and charge to breakdown values than data of virgin oxides. The results of this work give evidence that the time to breakdown and the injected charge to breakdown of the voltage stress measurements are strongly influenced by charge trapping effects in the oxide layer. Longer times to breakdown resulting from a RVS have to be taken into account when lifetimes at use conditions are predicted from RVS results. If this is not considered oxide lifetimes at operating voltage will be overestimated. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.