New Materials in Semiconductor Fabrication: An Evolutionary Process

摘要

An evolution has been taking place in CMOS fabrication processes, which received an injection of pace when Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.) and IBM (Yorktown Heights, N.Y.) both announced the use of hafnium in the high-k dielectric gate material. It is becoming clear that novel materials are going to play an important role in sustaining Moore's Law, along with the traditional scaling. The voracious appetite for rapidly storing and accessing information has prompted the need for materials with higher and higher k values, ranging from the oxides of aluminum to rare earth metals and those of every possible element in between. The challenges are enormous, as the novel molecules to make it all happen show some very unusual properties that make their transport onto the wafer more difficult and their breakdown chemistries much more complex.