Current semiconductor technology, the so-called the molecule reaction based semiconductor manufacturing, now faces a very severe standstill due to the drastic increase of gate leakage currents and drain leakage currents. Radical reaction based semiconductor manufacturing has been developed to completely overcome the current standstill by introducing microwave excited high density plasma with very low electron temperatures and without accompanying charge-up damage.The introduction of radical reaction based semiconductor manufacturing has made it possible to fabricate LSI devices on any crystal orientation Si substrate surface as well as (100) Si substrate surfaces, and to eliminate a very severe limitation to the antenna ratio in the circuit layout patterns, which is strictly limited to less than 100–200 in order to obtain a relatively high production yield.
In this paper, we demonstrate newly developed process technology to fabricate complementary metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistors (CMOSFETs) having atomically flat gate insulator film/silicon interface on (100) orientated silicon surface. They include 1,200 C ultraclean argon ambient annealing technology for surface atomically flattening and radical oxidation technology for device isolation, flatness recovery after ion implantation, and gate insulator formation. The fabricated CMOSFET with atomically flat interface exhibit very high current drivability such as 923 and 538 mA/mm for n-channel MOSFET (nMOS) and p-channel MOSFET (pMOS) at gate length of 100 nm when combined with very low resistance source and drain contacts, four orders of magnitude lower 1= f noise characteristics when combined with damage free plasma processes, and one decade longer time dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) lifetime in comparison to devices with a conventional flatness. The developed technology effectively improves the performance of the silicon-based CMOS large-scale integrated circuits (LSI).
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