Dramatic reduction of gate leakage current of ultrathin oxides through oxide structure modification

A New Physics Effect, Phonon-Energy-Coupling Enhancement, and Its Applications for Leakage Current Reduction of Gate Dielectrics

“…5 are mainly from RTP. It can be seen that there is two-order-of-magnitude reduction of leakage current (23,24). It should be noted that the current is FowlerNordheim (FN) tunnelling current for V g larger than 8V.…”

“…It was observed that there is no PECE effect when the oxide is too thick (80 nm) (23,24). Therefore it is unlikely that RTP can induce the structure change on the thick Si substrate (0.3 mm).…”

Lateral heating of SiO2/Si: Interfacial Si structure change causing tunneling current reduction

“…In the past, we reported observation of phonon-energy coupling enhancement induced by rapid thermal processing (RTP) of the SiO 2 /Si using infrared spectroscopy. 3,4 Large tunneling current reduction ($5 orders of magnitude) across SiO 2 (2-3 nm thick) was also observed accompanying the phonon energy coupling enhancement. 3,4 However, we could only reproduce leakage current reduction of 2-3 orders of magnitude for SiO 2 and silicon oxynitride.…”

“…3,4 Large tunneling current reduction ($5 orders of magnitude) across SiO 2 (2-3 nm thick) was also observed accompanying the phonon energy coupling enhancement. 3,4 However, we could only reproduce leakage current reduction of 2-3 orders of magnitude for SiO 2 and silicon oxynitride. [5][6][7] It was very difficult to reproduce the best results (4-5 orders).…”

Improved Si/SiOx interface passivation by ultra-thin tunneling oxide layers prepared by rapid thermal oxidation

“…Therefore, the research focus in many previous publications was on the aforementioned properties [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. The influence of growth temperature on the electrical quality of thin oxide-nanolayers has also been studied extensively, showing that the reliability of thin RTO oxides and furnace oxides are closely related to the Si/SiO 2 interfacial physical stress caused by the volume expansion from Si to SiO 2 during thermal oxidation [27,28].…”