Deuterium/Hydrogen Isotope Effect and Processing for CMOS Technologies

摘要

The substitution of deuterium for hydrogen in Si/SiO_2 interfaces is well known to drastically improve the hot electron lifetime of transistors. In this paper some of the proven deuterium process integration strategies for manufacturing CMOS devices are reviewed. It will be shown that an optimized deuterium anneal process (developed for manufacturing multi-level metal/dielectric MOS systems) can result in 50-100 fold improvement in channel hot carrier lifetime. Deuterium post-metal anneal processes are suitable for manufacturing high performance CMOS products and are fully compatible with traditional integrated circuit manufacturing. Furthermore, physical insight into the transistor degradation mechanism is provided by comparing the hot electron aging data to fundamental STM Si-H(D) desorption experiments and physics based simulations. Semiconductor processing involving deuterated silane (SiD_4) and ammonia (ND_3) is discussed along with advances in deuterium processing in solar cells, thin film transistors, porous-silicon LEDs, and charge coupled devices (CCD).