A Scientist's Perspective on the Early Days of MOS Technology

摘要

In September 1957, Frosch and Derick of Bell Telephone Laboratories. published a seminal paper in the journal of The Electrochemical Society concerning the use of silicon dioxide as a selective mask against dopant diffusion into silicon wafers. This oxide layer was soon shown to passivate the underlying p-n junctions. Subsequent Bell Labs work involved the fabrication of both bipolar and the newly developed metal-oxide-semiconductor, or MOS, transistors. At about the same time, Jean Hoerni of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation in Palo Alto, California, developed the so-called planar process, in which the diffused junctions were left covered by the masking oxide during subsequent device fabrication and operation. This process quickly began to revolutionize the semiconductor industry.