High-resolution transmission electron microscopy of silicide formation and morphology development of Ni/Si and Ni/Si1−xGex

Controlled formation and resistivity scaling of nickel silicide nanolines

“…The measured resistivities for both line widths were approximately 20 μ cm at room temperature, in good agreement with published results [3,7,22] and our own data for polycrystalline NiSi blanket films. However, these resistivities are significantly higher than those reported for NiSi NLs formed on vapor-solid-liquid (VSL) Si NLs [8,9].…”

“…After annealing, a silicide layer of about 17 nm thickness was formed on top of the 21 nm thick unreacted (110) silicon layer. The thickness of the silicide layer was the same as that of a NiSi film formed on a silicon wafer, which is 2.2 times the thickness of the as-deposited Ni layer [7]. The sheet resistance of the NiSi film was measured to be 11.8 / , corresponding to a resistivity of about 20 μ cm; this is consistent with values reported for NiSi films formed on single-crystal Si substrates [3,7,17].…”

“…Metal silicides are used in the selfaligned silicide (SALICIDE) process to form gate and ohmic contacts in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices [1][2][3][4]. The NiSi phase is of particular interest as a gate and contact material beyond the 45 nm node due to its low resistivity, low silicon consumption, and low formation temperature [5][6][7][8]. NiSi nanolines 6 (NiSi NLs) formed on silicon nanolines (Si NLs) by a bottom-up growth process were found to have a low resistivity of ∼10 μ cm at room temperature and a high critical current capacity of 10 8 A cm −2 for feature sizes down to 29 nm [8,9].…”

Test structures for study of electron transport in nickel silicide features with line widths between 40 nm and 160 nm

“…Low-resistivity NiSi is of considerable interest as a contact and interconnect material in silicon microelectronic technology. [7][8][9][10] In this study, a nickel layer was deposited onto the silicon lines and reacted to form small dimension silicide lines. Mono-crystalline NiSi fine lines were formed by controlling the reaction condition, and the resistances of a selection of them were measured.…”