Modelling the oxide and the oxidation process: Can silicon oxidation be solved?

摘要

The moves to miniaturisation and hence to thinner oxides (or successor materials), with the increased power of modelling, and with new information available from techniques like scanning probe methods, suggest it might be timely to face a major challenge. Is it possible to define what the best oxide would be like, to estimate its performance (especially its failure), and to predict the conditions which should lead to that optimum oxide? Clearly, for this to be achieved, it is essential to understand the key processes and to make accurate (but not necessarily first principles) quantitative predictions, as well as chosen experiments. This paper discusses some of the key questions and ideas: those of the growth processes, including the basic mechanisms (which cannot be Deal-Grove in character), how the observed layer by layer growth can be compatible with the observed growth at terraces, and the nature of the key degradation processes, like charge localisation and energy localisation.