Development and Characterization of High Temperature Plasma Nitridation Process for Advanced CMOS Technology Application.

In this work, high temperature plasma nitridation process was developed on TEL SPA tool. Thin thermal SiO 2 film was then surface treated by the nitridation process, and experiments were designed to evaluate its potential application in advanced CMOS technology. SIMS and XPS characterization were performed to analyze Si-N bond concentration and depth profile in thin thermal SiO 2 film. It is found that the Si-N bond ratio will increase and peak of Si-N bond concentration will be pushed from surface to the Si-SiO 2 interface as the process time increases. Based on the experimental results, Si-N ratio of the optimized process can reach ~13.5% with the peak at bout ~0.474 Å, which can well match advanced CMOS technology requirements.