Papers by Author: L.O. Keller

Abstract: The standard Local Oxidation of Silicon (LOCOS) technique uses different oxidation rates of silicon and Low Pressure Chemical Vapour Deposited (LPCVD) silicon nitride in steam ambient to structure the field oxide. Due to different coefficients of thermal expansion a pad oxide is needed at the boundary layer to prevent stress from the substrate. This leads to a lateral diffusion of oxygen, also known as “birds beak”, which limits the minimum structure size to a few 100 nm [1]. When scaling down to this dimension, the Shallow Trench Isolation (STI) has become the standard isolation technique for fabrication of high-performance semiconductors to allow a high package density. Unfortunately the STI-process uses Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) which increases the process complexity and leads to high costs. Therefore a new method which uses a low stress Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposited (PECVD) silicon nitride without a pad oxide at the boundary layer will be presented in this paper.

Abstract: µ-Raman measurements were carried out on hydrogen implanted, plasma hydrogenated and subsequently annealed Cz Silicon samples, respectively. In comparison to as-implanted or asplasma treated samples, in consideration of the thermal evolution, the effects of the implanted and subsequently plasma treated samples were analyzed. An enhanced trapping of molecular hydrogen in multivacancies has been observed after hydrogen implantation and subsequent plasma hydrogenation. In comparison to as-implanted samples, the intensity of the local vibrational modes (LVM) of vacancy-hydrogen complexes and silicon-hydrogen bonds are increasing.