Recent work on modeling dislocation behavior in small semiconductor structures was extended to the level of complexity appropriate to actual manufacturing situations. The dislocation-dynamics code PARANOID was generalized to handle arbitrary geometries and unstructured stress tables, and combined with commercial process-modeling software to study the dislocation configurations which arise during the growth of the well-known local oxidation of Si "bird's beak" structure. Experimentally observed dislocation patterns were reproduced with considerable fidelity. The observed Hu loop configuration was matched to 90% accuracy, provided that the long-range thermal mismatch stresses arising from cool-down were included. It was concluded that the main remaining obstacle to predicting dislocation behavior during device manufacture lay in the difficulty of using current 3-dimensional process-modeling codes to obtain reliable stress fields.

Combined Dislocation and Process Modelling for Local Oxidation of Silicon Structure. D.Chidambarrao, X.H.Liu, K.W.Schwarz: Journal of Applied Physics, 2002, 92[10], 6278-86