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10 - MOS systems with silicon dioxide dielectrics

from Part III - Real MOS systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2014

Olof Engström
Olof Engström
Affiliation:
Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenberg
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Summary

Engineering efforts at the dawn of MOS technology

In the exploratory phase of MOS technology, a major task was to find a material combination with an insulator/semiconductor interface free of charge. The fortunate coincidence that one of the most abundant elements on earth turned out to be an excellent semiconductor, and that its natural oxide offered an interface of high quality, gave the SiO2/Si structure a pivotal role in the development of electronics during the first 50 years of MOS progress (see Deal, 1974, and references therein). Especially in its role as a gate insulator of MOSFETs, thermally prepared SiO2 was developed to an extremely high electrical quality. The necessary change into a gate insulator with higher dielectric constant, k, to be described in Chapter 11, has not diminished the importance of this material for transistor gate functions. A thin interlayer of around 1 nm of SiO2 or an SiOx sub-oxide most often appears between the high-k material and the silicon interface. This has motivated an ongoing need to understand the physical and chemical properties of silicon dioxide, its sub-oxides, and the oxidation processes occurring at silicon surfaces.

The engineering efforts accomplished in the 1960s quickly found the bearings towards oxides with low enough concentrations of bulk charge and interface states for transistor production. The most widely used electrical methods, C–V (Grove et al., 1964, 1965) and the conductance method (Nicollian and Goetzberger, 1967), described in Chapters 2 and 6, for characterizing interface states and oxide charge, were developed in this empirical period. Also, a comprehensive amount of experimental efforts to find applicable oxidation techniques were undertaken and the most important correlations between oxide quality and process data were found and understood (Deal, 1974). Likewise, a useful phenomenological model for the oxidation process was established (Deal et al., 1965) and the sources of charge creation were identified as the four different classes described in Chapter 2. A more distinct understanding based on first-principle results became possible only later, however, after increased computing power and improved microscopy became available.

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The MOS System , pp. 231 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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