Material aspects of nickel silicide for ULSI applications

Structural and electrical characterization of the nickel silicide films formed at 850°C by rapid thermal annealing of the Ni/Si(100) films

“…In addition Si-enriched silicide islands with visible hole seems to precipitate finely in Si matrix. In other words, for the films with thicknesses ≤80 nm, NiSi 2 agglomeration is accompanied with grain boundary grooving, followed by grain separation and formation of Si-rich silicide islands, resulting in a dramatic increase in sheet resistance in accordance with grain grooving model [24][25][26][27]. Therefore, thermal stability (or quality) of these films considerably degrades due to both substantial increase in Si concentration and the occurrence of the silicide islands with small visible holes, yielding a remarkable increase in sheet resistance values of the Ni-Si films thinner than 80 nm.…”

“…However, nickel di-silicide (NiSi 2 ) formed from the low resistivity phase NiSi has the lowest lattice mismatch to Si and shows good epitaxial growth on Si [20,23]. NiSi 2 exhibits good thermal stability up to high temperatures of about 1000 • C. NiSi 2 loses adhesion to Si near its melting point of ∼993 • C [21], thereafter it starts to agglomerate with grain boundary grooving, followed by grain separation and formation of silicide islands, resulting in a dramatic increase in sheet resistance [20,[24][25][26][27]. This thermal instability is the main drawback which restricts its applications in deep submicron devices.…”

Back-End Deposited Silicon Photonics for Monolithic Integration on CMOS

“…• C causing contact resistance to increase [15], and copper diffusion that deteriorates transistor characteristics at a temperature as low as 600…”

Improvement of Thermal Stability of Ni-Silicide Using Vacuum Annealing on Boron Cluster Implanted Ultra Shallow Source/Drain for Nano-Scale CMOSFETs

“…However, when the gate length of the device is scaled down to 22 nm or less, fundamentally, new junction technologies are required to suppress the short channel effect (SCE) by producing ultra shallow junctions with super abrupt doping profiles, above equilibrium dopant activation and contact resistivity [1,2]. Novel silicide technology is also required to form a uniform and stable silicide on the ultra shallow junction.…”